Kill Bill Cipher
by William Easley
Summary: A parody of "Kill Bill" as if it were set in the Gravity Falls universe. Rated M! Character deaths, cartoon violence (lots!), swearing, sexual situations alluded to (not graphic). Not for everyone's taste, and not in my regular continuity. Thanks to Ghost Man for his help and input!
1. Chapter 1

I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. Nor do I own the films KILL BILL and KILL BILL TWO, the property of Quentin Tarantino, both of which are parodied here. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them.

* * *

 **Kill Bill Cipher**

 **Volume 1**

* * *

 **Prologue:**

Eleven years ago (by my count) in a small Oregon town, someone pulled off the infamous Twin Pines Massacre. Nine people, ranging in age from eleven to sixty-five, died literally or figuratively in the beginning of Earth's fall to the domination of a trans-dimensional demon named Bill Cipher.

Except . . . one of the victims didn't die, figuratively _or_ literally. Badly hurt, yes, put into a long-lasting coma, fighting back to consciousness and movement, finding a Master to study under, at last this one person has come to have a grim purpose.

I am that person.

After four years in a coma and seven years of study (time works differently where I studied), I am back home, back on the shattered remains of my Earth. It should be, by my internal count, the year 2023. However, time no longer exists in this dimension, so it's August 2012 forever. I should be eleven years older, too, but I'm not—just four years older, from my healing time while unconscious.

As with the subjugated Earth, when the Master took me to his dimension to learn, I was in a place where . . . time works differently. Things happen. Time does not pass.

As to the hospital that kept me while I was asleep . . . another story altogether. Maybe I'll get to that. Maybe not. We'll see.

I studied with my master for one purpose only: To learn how to deal out vengeance for what happened to me and my friends.

Revenge, my Master warned me solemnly on the first day I met him, can drain the soul's worth, corrupt the mind, and embitter the heart.

Confucius allegedly wrote, "Let him who seeks revenge begin by first digging two graves."

St. Paul advised that vengeance belongs to the Lord and no one else.

Forget all that. I have another quotation I like better.

" _La vengeance se mange très bien froide."_ Eugene Sue wrote that in a novel back in 1842. It didn't originate in _The Godfather,_ and the Klingons didn't come up with it first.

In English? Sure. "Revenge tastes best cold."

Oh, yeah. I'm hungry.

I survived all kinds of hell. I'm back.

And I'm setting out to kill Bill.

Bill Cipher, I mean.

Let's hit the road.

* * *

 **Chapter 1: Hexagony**

 _Take control, let her roll, head for the goal—_

 _Hell out on the highway! She's hell out on the highway!_

 _Says, "I don't care, I'll get you there,_

 _But you gotta do it my way!_

 _Hell out on the highway!_

 _Slip right in, take her for a spin, let me begin,_

 _Baby, turn my key, hold onto me,_

 _Gonna set your spirit free,_

 _She's hell out on the highway!_

-Robbie V. and the Tombstones, untitled and unfinished track from their final session

* * *

 _Here begins the roll call of the dead:_

Dipper Pines, age 12.

Mabel Pines, age 12.

Pacifica Elise Northwest, age 13.

Wendy Corduroy, age 15.

Robert Stacey Valentino, age 16.

Jesús Ramirez, age 23.

Fiddleford McGucket, age 62.

Stanley Pines, age 65.

Stanford Pines, age 65.

Gideon Gleeful, age 11, forever and eternally sentenced to be a caged, dancing fool—a living death

* * *

Nine killed, one dehumanized. Each night as I lie sleepless, I call their names in the bleak darkness, and I hear their ghostly responses: "Here."

Except one says "Present." There's always one smartass.

And with the heart in my chest cold and the tears in my eyes hot, I ask them the simple question, "What do you want?"

And they whisper "Revenge."

I'm the one of their number who didn't quite die, after all. I'm the one they ask for revenge.

Oh, yeah. Should be nice and cold by now. Eleven years by my count. Should taste _good._

I'll be damned if I don't give it to them.

* * *

The landscapes of North America have gone crazy, changed nearly beyond recognition. Washington DC is now Cipher Central. And that's where I head now, having cut my teeth on a tougher foe, whom I met and dealt with—I think—more than six months ago, subjectively. Anyway, it happened as soon as I returned to the altered Earth, armed with hate and anger, from whatever dimension it was where I served as apprentice to the Master. His last advice to me: "Do what your heart tells you must be done."

So I did.

After that first dish of vengeance, I'd had to go back to the Master's house for some R&R. He tended my hurts and gave me special drinks and herbs, waiting on me himself. His mixtures and skills closed up my wounds and cleansed the toxins from my body. Then when I was ready and whole again, he popped me right back into what used to be Gravity Falls.

Well, thanks a lot. Three thousand miles from where I wanted to be? I guess I'm not exactly the teacher's pet, huh? But then there's no second-guessing him. I suspect he may just have wanted me to see what a hellish mess Bill has made of the country. The first place I'd visited, Japan, wasn't actually in such bad shape. My cross-country tour of America was going to wrench my soul.

So. "Do what your heart tells you."

All right, my heart just now told me to steal a car and so I did. Cars no longer run on gas. They run on Bill power, I guess. The gas caps have been welded shut. The cars just go. Sometimes they also spontaneously explode, I suppose just to make things interesting. Maybe the damn demons place bets on them.

Thing is, Cipher doesn't really have all that many henchmaniacs. Less than a hundred to run the whole world. And none of them, not even Cipher, is omniscient, despite his lies to the contrary. I know that now. I knew it when I first returned. I knew it when I set off on my mission to kill the critical five. Without them, the earth might have a chance to return to normal, if I can trust my Master's opinion.

If Bill had been omniscient, he would have stopped me cold before I'd had a chance to begin. He didn't. He didn't even warn my target, his favorite henchmaniac. Omniscient, my ass.

As I said, on that first mission I had business away off in what used to be Japan. I got there, never mind how. With that under my belt, I'm gonna try to pay a call on Bill fucking Cipher. Too early, maybe, but—well, I'll see.

The car I had stolen was a heavily mutated Crown Victoria. Didn't obey speed laws. Cipher had left no police, no organized army, alive. So, at top speed, I headed east. What used to be east.

Top speed wasn't much. Roads and superhighways are mostly broken scraps of pavement mired in slippery or hardened mud. Didn't have to worry about fuel, but I kept having to stop and scrounge tires along the way. After many days of driving, I finally found one intact bridge across what I assume was the Mississippi. It's boiling now, with screaming monsters rearing out of it in threat or in agony. I don't know which, or care.

After that, sixteen more days and seventeen more nights of driving, stopping only to steal food or for an occasional beside-the-road bathroom break or to kick ass when some group of feral human goobers set up a road block to demand tolls (not money, but canned food, or tires, or sex. Not necessarily in that order). Four, maybe five times in all, I had to deal with that shit.

Anyhow, I paid them in my own kind of coin, left them poorer but mostly alive, and also built up a nice stock of confiscated weapons along the way.

Some of the old Interstate signs are still hanging and unburned enough to be legible. I got into what used to be Falls Church, Virginia, where the pavement clean disappeared on me. Nothing but rutted dirt tracks there these days.

The name of the town reminded me of Fall River, but that's in Massachusetts, I think. Somewhere up in New England. Anyway, that's where Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.

Sounds like the kind of BFF I'd like.

I shouldered my pack, stuck a couple of pistols—a compact Glock 19 and a CZ 75B—in my belt, shoved an extra full magazine for each in my pocket, and strapped a two-shot Derringer chambered for .410 shotgun shells to my leg. Too bad I had only four shells for that one. I took the guns just in case. I also had my old reliable weapon.

Through the dirt streets of a mostly human-deserted town I walked, tense, alert for movement. Something crawled out of a ruined storm drain to rush at me, scrabbling and gibbering and dripping green. Mutant, monster, what the fuck did it matter.

I shot it dead, one bullet through the head, and walked on, leaving its remains oozing green slime on the pavement. I glanced back once when I heard voices. Three savage-looking ragged people had gathered around the carcass. They were having dinner.

No point in asking a human for help in places like this. This close to a major demon, they got no minds left, and no guts. I slogged on, already sensing I wouldn't find Bill in old DC, but expecting I would find one of his chief minions. She was the demon to whom Bill had handed over Pacifica and Robbie, and she . . . liked to play with her food. Yeah. It's like that.

The Potomac bridges were all down. I didn't trust the polluted water enough to try to swim it or boat across. I took out my kill list. Number one, Pyronica, had been crossed off already.

Bill was number five.

But number two was supposed to live around here, not very far off. Hexagony. She and the other henchmaniacs who had corrupted and warped and killed two of my friends. She thought I was dead, too.

Wouldn't she be surprised if I dropped in for a visit.

Well, as long as I was in the neighborhood, why not.

* * *

For post-Weirdmageddon Earth, it was a normal suburban street. That means it had gone completely insane. Physics—shit, forget physics. Nothing worked the way it should.

Houses folded in strange ways, one-story cottages until you got close and then stretching higher than the eye could follow, vanishing in the blue haze of stratosphere. Or a three-story Victorian manor, all gingerbread and turrets, that morphed as you approach to become something like a fat, mold-splotched, garage-sized toadstool.

Shadow cars driven by shadow beings cruised the unpaved streets. Some drivers had been human. Some never were. None of them could see me—or if they did, I was just a shadow among shadows. Bill does not like those who conspire against him. His solution is to make them incapable of speaking to each other. It's like being a tourist in Zombietown. They look right through you.

Bill's paranoia is a perfect disguise for me. I hitch a ride in a shadow car. The car's real enough, understand, but it glides along, making no sound, and the blank-eyed, gray, washed-out man at the wheel doesn't register me or respond to me. As he makes turns, I become aware that what was once a human city is now laid out like a spider's web: Six major streets converging onto a six-sided space in the center, and a six-sided house occupying that center.

Hexagony. Bill's magic number was three. Hers was six.

Oh, I knew her number and I had her number.

The last time I had seen her, just before Bill killed me, she was a humanoid being, except for her head. It had six sides, each with six eyes. It rotated, flashing in the light. The main color, I think, was blue, but as one facet caught a gleam, it flashed silver. The eyes, each facet set with two rows of three of them, had no human depth or expression. They were glowing circles opening into emptiness.

I stamped across my driver's leg to jam on the brakes, twisting the steering wheel so the car bashed into the ruins of a stone mailbox. It stopped, I got out, and the driver sat there, still turning the wheel in the motionless car.

Not looking back, I walked up to the door of the hexagonal house. I rang the doorbell. I heard it play inside: the music was a woman's voice shrieking as if her feet had been thrust in a fire. Probably produced by a real woman kept alive only so her torture could announce visitors.

As I had expected, a mook answered the door—a runty little waist-high thing, a dwarfish creature with two legs and a torso and a bulbous head with six writhing tentacles sprouting from it. One of Hexagony's minions from her own dimension, no doubt.

It gibbered at me through a blowhole on the crown of its naked head, but because my Master had given me comprehension of all tongues, I could understand its alien language: "What do you want? You are not expected. Go away!"

So I split.

It. Into two halves.

The thing fell dead with no cry, just a thudding squelch. It had no organs that I could recognize. The contents that spilled and splattered looked like the leftovers you'd find in the garbage bin behind a low-class Italian restaurant. I jumped over the body, following an impulse.

That is not a metaphor. I could see a shimmer run along a narrow channel etched into the floor. It had to lead to the mistress of the house. A hexagonal door ahead of me began to close like the iris of an old-fashioned film camera. I tucked and rolled through it, landing on my feet and looking up.

Oh, yeah. There she was, dangling from the ceiling in the heart of her web. Hexagony. Six of those empty eyes snapped at me, and she skittered down the web she spun from an opening in the middle of her spine, a black widow closing in on an annoying bug. "Who are you?" she screeched.

"Hi," I said. "Long time, Hex."

She probably should have held onto the web, but she had already released and was in mid-air. She hit the floor before she reacted. "You!"

"Me," I said. "We have unfinished business."

"What?"

"I'm here to kill you."

She screeched again and shot her agony at me. That was her super power—she hit you with focused bolts of pure pain.

Imagine having splinters stuck under your finger and toenails, all of them at once. Then someone sets fire to them. Imagine a razor dividing your nipples, burning tar spilling on your genitals. Needles in your eyes, pushing toward your brain. Like that.

I took it without flinching and smiled at her. "Won't work, Hex," I said.

Then I think she was afraid. She sidestepped, circling me. "You are dead," she said. "You are a ghost."

"Nope. I'm here to send you to hell, Hexagony."

"No mortal can feel the pain I generate and still remain on its feet!"

"I've learned a trick or two."

Oh, yeah. One of the best that Master taught me: shunt the pain away. Pack it up and fold it and put it in a nice decorative trunk. Time to take it out and feel it later. You can't escape it, but you can put it off until later. First do what must be done.

"Look," she said, trying to make her horrible voice gentle and failing at that. "It wasn't me. It was Bill. You know that!"

I shook my head, keeping my gaze on her. "Bill was the brain. You were the arm and hand wielding the dagger. You hear about Pyronica?"

"She's disappeared!"

I smiled. "In a way. Gone for good. She was first on my list. She's crossed off. You're next."

She tried lashing me with pain again, and this time I used the second trick that Master had taught me. I made my mind a mirror and reflected it all back to her. Every. Last. Drop.

She fell to her knees, actually screaming "Help me!"

Mooks rushed into the room, but for the moment her fear, radiating like her agony weapon, had paralyzed them, too. Hexagony tried to push herself to her feet.

I cut off her feet, and she fell, thrashing, screaming, fire-hosing thick green glop. I grabbed her necklace—the spikes cut into my hand, but never mind that. I dragged her howling across the floor and with the other hand I cut down two more of the minions who made to block the door. The rest backed away.

Now Hexagony was screaming, wailing, bargaining, begging. "Please, no! Don't do this! You can't do this!"

Fuck that, lady. Just watch me. I dragged her onto the lawn. She was still screaming for somebody to help me, help me, help me. She left behind two parallel lines of green slime from her severed legs.

"Shut up!" I yelled at last, dumping her onto the front yard. A congregation of shadows gathered to witness. "If there's a hell," I told Hexagony, "tell Pyronica I sent you!" With one stroke, I cut off her head. Her neck crunched like an overgrown stalk of celery. Green spray erupted like gush from a broken water main. I kicked the head into the street. It bounced twice.

The shadows gasped and cried out and like snow on a hot day, melted away from the rolling head, fleeing whatever had killed the thing they had feared most.

Behind me, the hexagonal house shattered and fell, the fragments smoking away before they touched the earth. The body turned to stinking purple goo and bubbled. I watched until it was nothing but a dry, ashy paste.

When I'd cut off the head, a passing shadow car had careened off to the side of the street. I climbed into it. The only sign of its former driver was a greasy grayish-black sheen on the upholstery and the inside of the windshield. Must have been an interdimensional chauffeur.

The humans just screamed and ran away. The mooks couldn't live without their mistress. They dissolved.

Anyhow, I drove away from there. Not toward D.C. I wasn't ready for that yet. I had realized that when fighting to contain the pain from Hexagony. Bill could do worse. And now he would be expecting me. Looking forward to my visit.

Fuck him, make him wait.

Two down, three to go.

Master was right, take them in order. That was my best shot.

And the last one was the big one.

The jolts of stored pain started to hit me. I struggled and released them a little at a time, because if all of them came at once, I'd pass out. Even leaked gradually, they made my eyes tear until I wasn't always sure if I was on the street or crashing through yards.

Whenever I glimpsed a human figure, I stopped and screamed, and I think they heard me at last, because I saw them react. Maybe the pain Hexagony had channeled into me gave me extra power to break their trances. I don't know.

But I yelled every time, "Let Cipher know! Wendy Corduroy is alive, and she's coming for him!" I couldn't concentrate enough to drive the damn car, so I jumped out and ran for it. Cross another one off the revenge list. I had killed two of Bill's most trusted allies. Two!

It felt so damn good I cried all the time I was running, until finally I judged I had lost any possible pursuit. Hell, all her demonic servants must have evaporated when she died, and the humans were scared of me.

Still, I needed a refuge. I wiped my eyes, shoved through a wilderness of reeds on soggy ground, and finally found a culvert where I could crawl into darkness and collapse and pay my debt of agony.

It was cool and dark in there, and it stank like shit. Good place to be racked with pain until it was all used up. Oh, yeah, perfect.

Master Ax told me there'd be days like this.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2: The Blood-Spattered Birthday**

 _The dirty things I did when I was a kid,_

 _Waitin' to get bolder!_

 _Played rotten games, had lots of names,_

 _Wantin' to be older!_

 _Now I'm all grown, I can make you moan,_

 _Make you hum, girl, make you come, girl,_

 _Give me the blame, baby yell my name, baby—_

 _Baby, scream my name!_

 _-_ Robbie V. and the Tombstones _,_ "18th Birthday Rave"

* * *

 _If I am dead, why aren't I in hell?_

The question ran through my mind when I finally regained consciousness after a four-year nap, but before I could even move my fingers or my toes.

Open my eyes a slit, I see bright blue-white light that hurt, but nothing solid. Close them, the familiar unending dark.

Went back in memory, not sure when or where I was.

Dipper and Mabes. Birthday coming up. The big one-three. Technically teens.

What to give Dipper? _I know, my ushanka. Take his pine tree hat in exchange. Make him want to come back next summer._

Thinking, _Now I'm just two years older'n him._

Though I was fifteen, as the time came for him and his sister to leave, I remember feeling like I was thirteen myself: _What can I say to him? Now you gotta come back next summer? You mean so much to me, man? No. . . clap on the trapper's hat and say, something to remember me by. I'll work on Stan, make him make them come back next year. Dipper. Maybe he'll grow up some . . . I want him back._

Then time slapped my face and I remembered Bill and all that. No, he ain't gonna come back. Never.

In pain and memory, it all happened again:

That frozen moment, when I hung in a banner on the wall of Cipher's fucking flying fortress, not able to move, just able to hear and see.

"Eeny! Meeny! Miney! YOUUUU!"

And a giant Cipher who held both Dipper and Mabel in his hand like two playing cards, two of a kind, pointed his fucking finger at Mabel and—

"No!"

Dipper threw himself in front and shielded her, and _zap!_ His whole body from mid-chest to crown of head exploded in bloody fragments.

Stanford and Stanley screaming, "No!"

Mabel shrilling wordlessly, furiously beating at the giant fingers, eyes aghast at what remained of Dipper.

Me looking down, silently shrieking, unable to move or make a sound.

Cipher's playful voice: "Oops, missed. Mulligan!" He pointed at the screaming Mabel. Zap.

He'd splattered both Pines twins to blood and gobbets of meat and clotted gore. Bill shook the flesh rags off his hand. Then his eye turned unto a mouth and the goddam bastard licked the blood off his fingers.

Then he exploded Stanley. And then Cipher said, "There's more than one way to get that formula out of your brain, Sixer!" He picked up a struggling Stanford, his huge eye turned again into a shark-like mouth, and he bit of Stanford's head—

Then the weirdness barrier over Gravity Falls came down, and before the henchmaniacs flew out, good old Bill released us one at a time: Gideon he sent back to his cage to dance for eternity. Fiddleford—man, I hated to see what he did to the old guy, who died without a curse or a scream. He let Hexagony flood Robbie and Pacifica with pain until they begged him to make it stop, to let them die. Then a giggling Cipher had squashed Robbie like a bug and aged Pacifica until she turned to dust and bones. He turned Soos into a stone statue and smashed that with a conjured sledge hammer.

Pyronica and Hexagony were his helpers. He released me from my paralysis. Pyronica made a grinning, nasty suggestion to him. And really casually, he aimed his finger at me and said, "Run, Red!"

I didn't get ten steps before he fired a red beam. I tried to duck, but it hit me in the head and I . . . died?

Well.

Evidently not, because wherever I was, it didn't feel like hell.

* * *

At last I opened my eyes. Saw hospital stuff then. Indirectly-lit room, me on a bed. No windows. I wasn't hooked up to anything. No IVs. Just the metal-frame hospital bed. I rolled to my side and tried to stand up, and my legs wouldn't work so I crashed to the floor. I wore one of those damn hospital gowns, my ass hanging out.

Dragged myself across the cold white tiled floor, stretching my arms, flattening my palms on the chilly surface, pulling, dragging. The pine-veneer door opened itself as I crept toward it. Hauled myself out into a long, long corridor floored with black and white checkerboard tiles. Against the wall I found one of those metal frame things old folks use, a walker. Wheels on the front, tennis balls on the back legs. Used my arms to grab it, steady it against the wall, and haul myself to my feet.

No feeling from my thighs down. Not numb, just as if there was nothing there. Broke spine?

I held myself up just by my arms. Swung my hips, and my useless right leg swung forward with them. Tried to lock my knee. Didn't think it worked. Took some weight on it, anyhow, and to my surprise it didn't fold. Swung my hips. Baby step at a time. Going—where? No doors on the long white hall at all, none but the one I'd come out of. At the far end, though, maybe another? Something darker than white, anyhow.

I started to sweat and started to tremble. It was a thousand miles to the maybe-door. One step. Another. And repeat and repeat and repeat.

It was an open door, a rectangle into ultimate darkness. And I thought _Bill's in there._

And I thought, _I can't fight him. I can't even run._

And I thought, _Fuck it. I'm gonna at least die on my feet._

And I swung through the dark door and into the brightest, warmest golden light I had ever seen.

"Ah," said a strange voice, neither a man's nor a woman's, but somewhere in between. "I have been expecting you. Are you ready to begin?"

Then I was standing, or at least holding myself up, not in blinding light, but alone in a room with soft cushions and ankle-high tables on the floor. The walls hung with multicolored silk.

"Where are you?" I asked.

"Not the correct question."

"Who the fuck are you?"

"Better question."

And a bizarre alien form shaped itself out of air and said, "You may call me Master Ax. Are you ready to begin seven years of hell—or would you like some tea first?"

* * *

"I must first warn you," he said as he sipped his tea. "Your will is set on revenge. Revenge easily cheapens the soul's worth. It readily corrupts the mind, so what is good you see as evil and what is evil becomes your air and water and food. And even if you achieve it, you are left with an embittered heart. Are you sure you do not want tea?"

Clinging to the walker, I shook my head and between my clenched teeth, I said, "I was _dead_."

I didn't know it then, but we were to occupy this strange room that was to be my home for seven years that, technically, did not pass. I mean, I was gonna stay the age I was, nineteen, but to me it would feel like seven long years would go by, OK?

"I was dead," I repeated.

"No," Master Ax said. With no hint of humor in his tone, he explained, "You were nearly almost dead but not quite. You dodged at exactly the right moment and the ray went through your skin and bone but not completely through your brain, though it caused some damage. I sent someone to save you. You would not think much of him, but I tell you this: The bravest thing I ever knew a human to do was for that poor terrified man to return to the Fearamid, yet he did it and brought you to me."

"I'm not sure," I said, with my arms shaking from strain, "he did me any favors."

The Master let that go by. "You were badly injured and needed something I have none of here—time. Time for healing. I put you in a—well, you think of it as a hospital facility, a place where time passes, unlike here. Four years went by and let your body slowly heal and your mind retreat from madness that would have swallowed it. Don't thank me. As you train with me, you will come to realize that saving you was, as you say not precisely a favor." He released his empty cup, and it vanished.

I let all that sink in. For four fucking years I had been in that hospital room and in a coma. Maybe there had been doctors and nurses, I didn't know. Or maybe spirits had tended to me, changed my catheter and IV bags and all that. I didn't know. Probably never will. Master Ax won't talk about it.

I didn't understand half the shit that Master Ax laid down. Hard to wrap my head around it. I'd been out for _four fucking years_. I was now nineteen fucking years old!

But the next seven would be nothing. I mean I wouldn't age. As Master Ax explained over and over, time did not exist here. I would train for what would feel like seven years, but seven years would not pass for me. Then when I graduated or got expelled, I'd go back to a four-years-from-Weirdmageddon Earth. Except that time there was wonky, too, stuck, frozen in August 2012. My head felt like it was a second away from exploding.

"Train for _what_?" I asked, holding myself only by my shaking arms there in this weird Asian-with-Aztec sort of room, with the damn hospital gown hanging down in front to my elbows, exposing my tits, leaving my ass bare. I didn't care. Nobody could see me. Nobody human.

"To kill Bill Cipher, of course," said Master Ax.

And I guess those were the magic words, because then I could feel my toes and my feet and my calves and my thighs. I straightened up and let go of the walker, and the fucking gown fell off me, leaving me bare-ass naked and not giving one good damn about it.

"Will you have tea now?" Master Ax asked.

"Fuck the tea. When," I asked, "do we start?"


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3: The Ignition of Pyronica**

 _She got_

 _She got what_

 _She got what she needs to be hot—_

 _She's so damn hot! She's so damn hot!_

 _Ghost pepper in a pot!_

 _Day we met she popped my sweat,_

 _Day we kissed I couldn't resist,_

 _She's a treat I wanna eat,_

 _Hot and sweet,_

 _What it takes, she got,_

 _Makes me beat my—_

 _My God, she's hot!_

-Robbie V. and the Tombstones, "She's Hot"

* * *

Perhaps rumors of Dimension 666 somehow drifted between realities and lodged in the minds of people like Dante Alighieri or Jonathan Edwards, who decided the rumors were news hot from hell.

Fact: All dimensions with intelligent life in them must have some degree—see what I did there?—of heat. Frozen dimensions exist, but they are lifeless and from what I learned, frankly fucking boring. Nothing happens, no time passes, nothing moves, no light, no air, no nothing. Like a sixth-period English class in February, am I right?

By contrast, some dimensions have lots of heat, too much heat. Ramp it up too high, and molecules fly apart and won't, like, stick to each other. Those dimensions roar, but if a dimension roars without ears to hear it, is it making a sound or what? Wise sages ask the question. Wiser sages say, "Who the fuck cares?"

Master Ax taught me many things, among them how to hate efficiently. He started by making me hate him. I use the word "him." That's probably not right, but Master Ax is not an "it." Master Ax is an "other." Both sexes, no sexes, all sexes, all at once, is what I'm saying. So far beyond the range of human experiences that light from the fucking Big Bang hasn't even reached where he is yet.

Anyway, I'll call Master Ax _him_ , because that's arbitrary but understandable. He began by clothing me—white knee-length pants, a tight stretchy white top. No shoes, I'd go barefoot. Good for the sole, he said, ha-ha. He just made the ensemble appear from thin air, already on me. They were, as I say, tight. Not too snug, not meant to show off my shape, but to make movement easy and fluid.

And speaking of fluid—Master Ax decided that we would live in a sort of temple on the flat summit of a thousand-foot-tall four-sided pyramid. I swear, that wasn't where I first found the weird room, but that's what he decided, so the pyramid came into existence. Now from the top of the thing, where the room was, he made one unbroken set of unrailed stone steps leading straight down to the ground, which is where the goddam well was, and every morning I had to shoulder a yoke with two pails swung from it and walk down 1,800 fucking steps, fill the pails, and tote them back up the 1,800 fucking steps without spilling any water.

Master Ax had to have water for his tea.

Three thousand six hundred fucking steps is a lot of fucking steps. But Master Ax floated along beside me going down and going up, like he was reclining on a cloud, and told me stories. Did that every damn day for seven long years, or what felt like that long. I eventually realized he wasn't entertaining me, but educating me, so after the first week, I listened to him.

And the first long story was about Pyronica and the dimension she came from . . . Dimension 666, or as the natives there called it, "reality." But sometimes, just as sometimes we used to call it Earth or the world or whatever, they called it a word that in English means "Immolation." Near as I could understand it, that was a planet. Their world.

The inhabitants of Immolation, the one and only populated world in all of Dimension 666, not only survive heat, they thrive in it. The whole dimension sizzles at a constant temp of around 475 degrees Fahrenheit. The Immolants have to have it that way. They die without it, unless, like Pyronica, a trans-dimensional demon gives them the power to survive, carrying their own flames with them everywhere. Anyway.

They don't have families in the way humans understand them. They don't make babies the way humans do. Instead, they bud and split. The female-looking ones get growths on their backs that eventually get to be the size of a soccer ball and then drop off. In one or two of their days, the ball that a female drops will grow a head and arms and legs and eventually mature into male-looking ones, ready to bud on their own.

But the male-looking ones produce buds that turn into female-looking ones. There's some kind of genetic swapping going on someplace along in there, but damned if I can straighten out who does what to who.

Essentially, the little bud is the kid of whoever it dropped off. The dropper raises the kid for about six Earth years or so, and then it's adult enough to go off on its own.

Ordinarily, the Immolants are heat-lovers but not hot-headed. I mean, they have language but no writing, friends but no lovers, arguments but no wars, desires but no murder.

Or they didn't. Little Pyronica dropped off some young guy. She was his first kid. He collected the ball and tended it until the head, legs, and arms had grown. Showered the baby with affection and support. Then when she was about four, Pyronica killed him for nothing, for spite, for the lulz. She was what you'd call a prodigy. She'd invented murder.

In Dimension 666, nobody had ever killed anybody before. They didn't know what to do about Pyronica. So she killed a bunch more and they sentenced her to be extinguished. Which meant shooting her into outer space, or its equivalent, sending her where there is no heat no air to support combustion, and she would die. Something sort of like that. Anyway, here space is where there's no air, but there it's mainly where there's no heat.

Except Bill Cipher, who had his stinking finger in practically every dimensional pie back then, saved her. And let her go back to Immolation and massacre, like, the whole city where she'd lived. And she liked it. But Cipher took her into the Nightmare Realm before she wiped out all of her species. That was something he prided himself on—he was the only one who had done that to his dimension, and he wanted to hold onto the title, I guess.

Anyway.

Pyronica signed on as one of Bill's first henchmaniacs.

See, all the time, Bill was looking for the right dimension to take over. He'd messed with thousands, at least. Ours was one of a great many. In the end, we seem to have won the fucking lottery.

But meanwhile, over millions of years, Pyronica helped Bill gather his posse. The worst interdimensional criminals and crazies, and they hired on because Bill offered them the chance to do violence to everyone they hated in their own dimension providing they swore eternal loyalty to him.

Dudes, they pledged him their fucking _lives_.

Which meant that they had to serve and protect Bill, 'cause if he ever died, really and truly died—so would they. The time they borrowed from Bill would have to be repaid with interest. The whole Nightmare Realm would collapse into a single point, a singularity, and pull them all back into it and crush everyone and everything out of existence for good.

And it didn't matter where they were at the moment—at Bill's death, they'd be dragged back into their hideout, the Nightmare Realm, and into oblivion. Sayonara, suckers.

Which, I guess, explains their loyalty.

Master Ax told me many such stories. Lucky Pyronica, she was living in the lap of luxury now, four years after Weirdmageddon.

Listen:

In Japan there is a mountain named Fuji. You see it all the time in illustrations, a graceful cone with snow around its summit. It is a volcano. It last erupted in the 1700s.

Now it erupts all the time. Fountains of lava, billows of red-orange flame, black bunches of clotted smoke. And there in the middle of all that heat, Pyronica makes her home, a building constructed of heatproof magic materials. The flames that fill it roll off molten rock at a temperature of about fifteen hundred degrees. She likes it. Being the only Immolant in our dimension, she lives there alone.

Ah, but her office is in Tokyo. What used to be Tokyo. She is the Boss of Asia. Cipher gave her the power to invade and take over the minds of humans. He allowed her eighty-eight as her elite guard. She found the toughest and the meanest sons and daughters of bitches and made them hers.

From their stronghold in old Japan, they go forth over Korea, China, as far as India. In those places, the human survivors—nowhere near as many as there used to be, but still more than a billion—slave for her benefit. She is the Boss. Her whim is law. Any who resist . . . she plays with. Until they beg for death. Then she turns the still-conscious remains over to her minions.

"When you meet them," Master Ax explained, "you must kill them. Have no mercy. They look human but are not, not any longer. Their souls are gone, their minds are gone. They are only a part of Pyronica now. Each one you kill weakens her."

"I'll kill them all," I told him.

Patiently, firmly, he said,"Listen. Heed me. Revenge is a crooked path through a dark wood. You must not allow yourself to get lost."

"I—"

Sharply, he repeated, "Listen! Mercy. Compassion. Forgiveness. These are luxuries you can no longer afford. Pack them away. Don't discard them, keep them stored. Unpack them only after it is all over."

"Yes, Master Ax, I—"

His impatient voice cracked like a whip: "Listen! You have some skill. This is your first test. It will be difficult. You must kill Pyronica. She is the one who advised Bill to release you and your friends from captivity in the banners and kill you. She did not depart when almost all of Bill's other servants left the Fearamid. She enjoyed suffering too much. She and one other stayed and watched Bill kill them all—and she told him to have fun with you, to let you try to run. When you fell, she laughed and she told Bill, 'The bitch is dead.' All this time she has believed he killed you. You will show her this is not true. When you succeed, if you succeed, I will return you here and point you to more whom you must deal with. But it will not be an easy fight, and when you come back, you may need rest and healing."

"I under—"

Now his voice became quiet but deadly serious: "Will you listen! First, before you start, you will need . . . a suitable . . . weapon."

Finally, he let me finish: "I understand."


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4: The Man with the Edge**

 _The eyes in the mirror, they're eyes of a fool,_

 _Eyes of an asshole, eyes of a tool!_

 _I hate that face I see every day,_

 _Want to grab a knife and cut it away!_

 _Pound the mirror, bust the glass,_

 _Today I whip somebody's ass!_

 _Grab the shards and cut so deep—_

 _Dig 'em in the veins, make blood leap!_

 _My anger drains away, now I want to sleep. . . ._

Robbie V. and the Tombstones, "Cut"

* * *

The Multiverse is strange. Somebody said it's not only stranger than you imagine, but stranger than you _can_ imagine. Master Ax told me it's even stranger than imagination itself.

I mean, there's lots of weirdness, beginning with all these timelines, you know? Every event branching at least two ways, creating new timelines where other _yous_ do things you yourself would never do. Like somewhere there's at least one reality where somehow Dipper and Mabel and Stanley and Ford beat Bill Cipher and stop Weirdmageddon, I guess. That's a branch of my dimension. My shitty luck was not to be born in that one.

But in addition to the bazillion time lines within any dimension, there are bazillions of whole _other_ dimensions. In some of them, the people are made of silicon. In some, the laws of nature are way different from here. In some there are life forms that I wouldn't even recognize as _forms_ , let alone living ones.

However, there's a whole buttload of dimensions where the inhabitants look, more or less, like people: two legs, two arms, no tail, one head, right? The hands may have three fingers or four or five. The heads may have two eyes, on stalks or not, or one eye, or three, four, five, the eye's the limit, I guess. And their skins may be pink or brown, or purple, red, green, striped, or spotted. But even so, they're kinda-sorta people.

Master Ax sent me to one of these off-the-beaten-track dimensions, really pretty damn close to mine, far as the inhabitants went. They looked not too different from the kind of people I knew back in Gravity Falls. Well, _way_ different from Tony Determined, who's the ugliest son of a bitch I ever met. Was his name Tony? Toby? Something like that.

Anyway, I walked out the door of the Master's house and toward those damn steps down leading to the well, but I took just the top step down and emerged somewhere else entirely. Going through the doorway of, I guess, a bar? Looked like a bar. Little place, six beat-up tables, four chairs each, nobody at any of them, and at the end of the room a bar, bottles in racks against the wall behind it.

Nobody there but me and a burly guy standing behind the bar. He wore a brown collared shirt and over it a stained old frayed white cook's apron and kept his right hand beneath it, resting on the swell of his belly, while he polished the counter with a rag held in his left hand. Five fingers, even had nails, I noticed. Black crescent moons of dirt under all the nails.

He spoke some kind of guttural language, strange to me, but Master Ax had given me, somehow, a gift of tongues and I almost understood him. "Werucome!" he said in a thick accent, at least in my head. "You to a-coming in! Have sit! You to wanting a menayou?"

"Hi," I said in English. "I'm new here."

"Ohhh, you speak Engrich!" he said in my language. Well, approximately. "You vacation, no? Come-a in, come-a-on-in! You hunger, we got real Gerasin food here, best you find on-a ira-rand!"

Took me a second to realize he'd said "island." "Could I sit at the bar?" I asked.

He smiled and reached beneath the counter with his left hand. "Sure, sure! Sit. I get a menayou—"

"I'd like a drink first," I said. What the hell, I'm nineteen and hadn't even had a beer in eleven years, subjective time.

"You like-a a dreeenk?" he asked, his voice fluting the word "drink" up the scale. "You want-a carbonarated water? Fruit fravor? Got cherry, glape, merron—"

"A glass of Halaki," I said.

He stepped back, his brown eyes round. Though strongly built, even muscular, he was not as tall as me, his complexion brownish-yellow, his age . . . probably over sixty. Still, he looked human. Two brown eyes, thick bushy swept-back black hair going gray, a bristle of whiskers on cheeks and chin. "Ooh-ah!" he said. "Halaki! You have ever had-a before?"

I shook my head. "My friend told me I should order it," I said. "I'm old enough."

"Halaki!" He whistled, but turned and with his left hand picked up a strange bottle, which would hold maybe a quart, but its neck was nearly two feet long. He set it on the bar and then brought out a clean glass—I hoped it was clean—and standing well back, he poured the glass half full of a clear, oily, pale-green liquid. "Halaki!" he said, carefully setting the bottle down again. "You still can back out, no-a-body know." I was getting the hang of his pronunciation by then and understanding him better.

Master Ax had told me what to do. I put one of the octagonal coins he had created for me on the bar and slipped it toward the bartender. I picked up the glass. It felt warm. I raised the glass. "Thank you," I said.

 _You must throw the drink back into your mouth very quickly. Swallow without thinking. Then look Miyanzo in the eye and thank him again._

I put the glass to my lips. The bartender—Niyako Miyanzo—watched me with cautious, narrowed eyes, as if I were a tiger just let off her leash. I took a deep breath and damn near passed out from the fumes. But I jerked my head back, the fiery stuff washed into my mouth, and I gulped.

Oh, I wanted to pound on the bar and beg for ice water. But I closed my watering eyes and felt the fire hit my belly and simmer to a mere boil. I took a second coin out and looked Miyanzo in the eye. "That was the best Halaki I've ever had," I told him in his own language. I put the second coin atop the first. "Thank you."

Looking very solemn, he spread his fingers on his chest and bowed low to me. "You are a very special girl," he said.

"I am that," I told him, keeping to his language. "I came to you because someone told me you could make something for me. Only you, nobody else."

"I make?" he asked. He smiled. "You speak very good Gerasian. You understand if I tell you I mix drinks, I pour drinks, but I make nothing. Not any longer."

"I need an axe," I said.

He poured himself a drink of the liquid hell. He took a slow, long, thoughtful sip. "Who sent you?" he asked, his voice pitched low and tense.

"Master Ax."

"Ah. I thought maybe it was so." He frowned. "Many years ago, when I was a young man—how old are you?"

"Nineteen," I said.

"I was older than you. Twenty-five. No, twenty-six. Already they called me Miyanzo the Edge. Best weapon forger in the islands, I was. One day a demon came to me in my forge. That was back when I created swords, halberds, spears, other weapons. He told me he could make me the best edge man in the world. I just had to shake his hand." He finally took his right hand out from under his apron and held it up for me to see.

It was not a human hand. It was metal.

"I made him an axe. He did not use it for defense, but for . . . sport. He killed many people with the axe I made. Hundreds. At the end, twenty-one priests united to drive him away from this reality. They succeeded, but at the end, nineteen of them he had chopped into pieces. Just two lived, both grievously wounded. One of them brought the axe back to me, told me to put my right arm along the counter. He chopped my hand off. I let him. I had dishonored my profession."

"You stopped making things?"

"I make this." He held up his metal hand. The fingers worked. "Your Master Ax, he visit me once after. He somehow fixed it so the hand I had created could move. No feeling in the fingers, but see." He picked up the empty glass with the metal hand, tossed it spinning, caught it, set it down so that it balanced perfectly at a forty-five degree angle, resting on one edge of its bottom. "Almost as good. But this hand was the last thing I made. No more blades. I swore."

"Let us drink together," I said. "I'll make you a pledge: I need the best axe in the universe because I'm going to kill Bill Cipher."

He stared at me and said softly, "Oh, so. What is your name?"

"Wendy Corduroy."

"Strange name." He tried it on his tongue. "Wen-a-dy Cord-a-roy. You are not from our world, are you?"

I shook my head. "Bill got into my home world, too. He seized control of it. Still runs it. I mean to take him down. Pour, please."

We had both drunk out of the same glass up until then. He took out a new one. Using his metal right hand, he poured each glass about a third full of the Halaki. Before I could pick mine up, he spread his metal palm over it. "Wait. Thirty-three years ago, I made the axe that took off this hand. I tell you, I swore never to make a weapon again. Not to the priests who took my hand, but to myself and to my God. Now you ask me to break my oath. That is a serious thing. It could send my soul to hell."

"If your axe can kill Bill Cipher," I said, leaning close, "it's sharp enough to cut down the gates of hell."

He nodded, moved his hand, and picked up his own glass with his human hand, his flesh hand. "It will take," he said, looking thoughtful, "one month to forge the weapon. You may sleep in the attic room. While I work in the forge, you will tend the bar for me and serve the customers. You can do?"

"I've had some practice at retail," I told him.

"Then we have a deal." He smiled grimly. "I no longer shake hands." We clinked rims and sealed our deal by drinking another serving of hellfire.

"Ahh," he said when the toast had ended. "I will go to work tonight. I close the restaurant now. Up in the attic you will find a chest with bedding. Also on the walls, many blades hang, ones I made in the old days. Choose one you like. When you are not at the counter, you must practice with it."

"Do you think I can do what I intend to do?" I asked.

His gaze met mine. "I see in your eyes you have the spirit. You now need luck. And practice. And great courage. And the best axe in all the universes. But you are a girl who can drink Halaki and not puke or scream." He picked up the coins. "Plus, you tip good. Can you do it? I don't know. Bill—very powerful bastard, Bill. He has hurt you, yes?"

Answering him was worse than drinking the liquor. But I choked out the answer. I could not speak Gerasian, did not trust my voice to hold out, but in English, I said, "He killed my family and all my friends. He hurt me, yes."

"You may not be able to kill him," Miyanzo said, "but you deserve the right to try. One condition. You fail, he kill you, you come to the gates of hell. Bring the axe I will make for you. Chop the gates down for me, because I will want to get out."

I bowed to him. "Mr. Niyako, it's a deal."

Climbing those 1,800 steps to Master Ax's house was hard. It was nothing climbing up two flights of wooden steps to the cold attic while carrying a headful of Hilaki, but I made it. I pulled bedding, quilts and such, from a big lacquered chest and made my bed by throwing it all on the floor.

By then I could hardly stand up. But I leaned on the wall and found a war-axe my size, probably crafted for some young prince or some deal. I pulled it from its niche and swung it. It was better than any axe I'd used on Earth, so I took it to bed with me that night, and then every day after that I spent six hours practicing with it.

I'd been pretty good with an axe even before Weirdmageddon. I got to be freaking awesome with one.

And one month—twenty-eight days exactly—later, Miyanzo ceremonially handed me a leather scabbard. "Treat it well, Wendy Corduroy," he said. "It is the finest ever made, anywhere in the Multiverse. After this, I think no one on my world will forge axes any more. They will be ashamed to produce pale copies of this, my best work. I call this one _Zyeribia Sto'_."

I took it and reverently held the handle and pulled the axe from its sheath. God, it was beautiful, gleaming like the purest silver with the highest polish. It felt wonderful, the balance perfect. The edge looked sharp enough to cut through a spoken word. "I will do you honor with this weapon," I promised, holding it on my open palms as I bowed to him. "And I like the name."

He returned my bow. "Thank you."

Oh, yeah. He'd given it the perfect name.

 _Zyeribia Sto'._

" _Whisper of Death."_


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5: Big Trouble at the Flame Pit**

 _Better run for all you're worth,_

 _Better seek cover!_

 _Soon there's gonna be hell on earth,_

 _Hide 'til it's over!_

 _Kill! Kill! Faster, faster!_

 _Kill! It's a massacre disaster!_

-Robbie V. and the Tombstones, "Fight or Flight."

* * *

The Flame Pit is not difficult to find. It stands in old Tokyo where once Fujimi Terrace did. Architecturally, it is—what else?—a pyramid. Thirty stories tall, though the bottom ten were a fortress, nearly solid, and didn't count on the elevators. It's tall for an earthquake zone, but pyramids are pretty sturdy shapes—and it's held up by Bill's voodoo or magic or interdimensional mumbo-jumbo, whatever.

One thing about Pyronica: she's a party gal. Of the whole earth, maybe Japan is the closest to normal human life of all the other domains. Bill sheds chaos the way a Persian cat sheds hair. Whatever he touches turns to shit—at least for the human inhabitants.

Old Pyronica, though, she keeps a semblance of normality going—people have jobs, they have transportation, mostly high-speed rail, but gasless buses, a few gasless cars, and even some airlines, the planes flying not with aviation fuel but with infernal pixie dust, I guess.

The people work, they produce stuff, they make money, and always they're encouraged to party, party, party. Sake flows freely. Among other things, the Flame Pit is a casino. It's also a night club. And a corrupted Geisha house, which means a whorehouse that caters to every flavor of sex, long as it's dirty.

But the upper reaches, the top six floors—those are Pyronica's headquarters. That's where she runs the whole show, Japan, Korea, and most of China, all of what used to be Myanmar, and smaller parts of Southeast Asia and northern India. It's a huge chunk of geography, the second-biggest Earthly realm. Bill's is first, of course—North and South America, all of Europe, western Russia.

Bill's subjects pay their taxes to him with their blood and pain. Pyronica's use money. She uses it to pass her life in alternating decadence and cruelty, never leaving Japan and rarely showing up anywhere but her private home and her center of government, the Flame Pit.

The top of the main pyramid is the pit—literally. There's a ten-foot-wide open-air walkway and terrace bordering an inner, smaller pyramid, and red rolling flames gush 24/7 from the top of that crowning pyramidette. I learned that from the terrace you get a great view of Fuji-san—Mount Fuji, seventy miles away as the crane flies. You can spot it because its top, too, is lit up by billowing crimson flames. Pyronica changed it so it's always in eruption.

Master Ax had warned me this was my final exam. If I could succeed, if I could bring down Pyronica, then I had at least a chance at Cipher. If I failed, I'd die.

Hell of a way to flunk out.

The best way for me to get into the place was to pose as a tourist.

So Master Ax disguised me. He made my copper-red hair jet black and made me wear it in two long braids. He gave me a deep tan. He had me wear round tinted glasses that made my green eyes look brown. And he had me wear a goddam jumpsuit.

No, really. A bright yellow jumpsuit. With a fucking triangle design on the back of the jacket in golden studs. And I carried Whisper in a sheath strapped to my back, beneath the jacket. He told me there would be metal detectors. He told me not to worry about them. He gave me more of the weird octagonal coins—these ones were mostly gold and showed an image of Bill Cipher. Surrounding him were tiny symbols of the Cipher Zodiac, ten of them. If you looked close, each one had a circle round it and a bar across it. Cancelled out.

Master Ax told me what to do and what to say and where to go and how to use the coins.

I needed the VIP entrance. Not at street level, where the peons pressed in, no. I had to go to the old Higashi-Kurume Station, find the entrance to Sukainīdoru—a glass and steel tower rising ten stories, the "Sky Needle," which contained a glass elevator. Ride the elevator up to the top, the only stop it made. Then walk through a hamster tube to the tenth floor of the Flame Pit. Simple.

The two mooks at the entrance to the Sky Needle were human, maybe former Sumo wrestlers, massive, unsmiling, their bulk testing the strength of the fabric in their black suits. Not many of us VIPs lined up, about half a dozen. Each one in line ahead of me showed his or her chit—a yellow card that granted entrance to the favored few. I hung back to the very end of the line.

The elevator was almost full. Room for one more. One of the guards looked at my face and in English said, "Your pass." He held out a hand the size of a baseball mitt.

I looked him in the eye. "You don't need to see my pass."

He frowned, but his brown eyes went vague. The other guard said in Japanese, "What's wrong? You're holding up the line. Check her pass."

"We don't need to see her pass," the first guard said.

"What do you mean?"

I said, "I'm someone important. Let me in."

The second guard looked angry, but then he bowed, and in English, he said, "Excuse us, please. You may enter."

The crowd in the elevator leaned heavily to gold and diamonds. Styles had changed. Two of the women wore short-shorts, boots, a cape, and nothing else, except ropes of pearls or diamonds. A couple of the men in colorful Nehru-collared and knee-length coats chatted them up and fondled their bare breasts. The women threw back their heads and laughed, putting their free arms around the necks of the guys while their other hands carelessly held their clutch purses.

The elevator cage rose in the night sky. A recorded voice said, cycling through Japanese, Mandarin, French, and English, "You can see the home of the Honorable Pyronica, Mount Fuji, through the right side of the elevator." I saw the distant glowing red dot. Big fucking deal.

The car stopped and spilled us out into a long, broad walkway. We had to pass another checkpoint. This time the mooks looked like robots—or cyborgs. Human, tall, thin, unsmiling, with metal helmets covering the tops of their heads down to their eyes. They were Japanese with thin faces, high cheekbones. They moved and talked like machines.

"Your pass," one said.

I doubted the old Jedi mind trick would work on this hybrid, so I handed over the yellow pass, and the mook scanned it and handed it back to me. Behind me, one of the underdressed women was yelling in Japanese, "I had it! It's here somewhere! I just showed it to the elevator man!"

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank the late Stanley Pines, who taught me all I know about picking pockets—and purses.

We followed the walkway into a nightclub. A sqfuare stage dominated the center of a sprawl of room, with round tables dotted all around it, and a J-pop group was performing. They amused me for about five seconds. They were singing one of Robbie V and the Tombstone's old songs. So much for nostalgia.

Look, I won't go through my ascent of Mount Flame Pit, OK? I'll just say I had to go up a total of ten floors. I didn't do that by ordinary routes. Three times I had to blind cameras temporarily. I took access tunnels with steam and water pipes in them. I rode up partway on the top of an elevator car. I came out, finally, in the ultimate haven for the cream of the VIPs, the ippest of all the vees.

Seventeenth floor, one floor above the main security center. Gambling den. Casino. Humans and interdimensional monsters mingled at card and roulette tables, betting, laying out coins, raking them in. Some human games, cards and dice and roulette, some that I didn't even remotely recognize involving small living creatures that generally died painfully, judging from the squeals and shrieks.

Two dozen guards were on duty, the helmeted robotized kind, some lining the walls, some patrolling the floor. A long stairway led up to the eighteenth floor. That one held secure rooms full of armaments, I knew, more guards, and attendants to issue weapons in case of emergency. A communications and computer level came next. Above it was my goal, the twentieth floor. Thirtieth, if you counted the bottom ten-story fortress level. That was where Pyronica usually lounged, where she held court, where she gave orders to her scum squad of torturers and assassins.

Nobody was allowed to go up the stairs. I lounged. Got a drink and carried it without tasting it. Bet a little money here and there on roulette, lost it all, didn't mind. I was scoping the place out and waiting for something.

No, check that.

Waiting for _someone._

At midnight she showed up, way at the top of the stair. She was mostly naked, and I saw where the ladies got their sense of style. _Her_ jewelry, though, consisted of flickering white flames, the Bill-granted blaze that kept her alive and happy. She had crooked horns, spikes from the crown of her head down her upper spine, one eye, and a lascivious-looking mouth with sharp teeth and a snake-like, pointed tongue.

She wore only high heels, a cape, stockings, and elbow-length gloves. Her body glowed pink with heat. The stockings and gloves seemed woven of the pale flames.

Down the staircase she came with an exaggerated swing of leg. She stopped halfway down and surveyed the room, smiling. Many of the gamblers saw her and yelled her name. She did that fucking stately hand-wave I'd see in videos of the Queen of England. "Having fun?" she called.

A chorus of agreement said they all were. When that died down, I said, "Not yet!" loudly enough for everyone to look around.

Pyronica frowned at me. "You look familiar," she said. Good acoustics, because even at a distance I heard her very painly.

I drew my axe. "My name is Wendy," I said. "And you and I have unfinished business."

She stared, no comprehension in that single eye. She didn't even fucking remember me. She smiled, shrugged, and turned around to go back up the stairs, her buttocks flexing. Over her shoulder, she yelled, "My people, kill her! Everybody else, get out!"

The civilians didn't even pick up their money but poured toward the one exit. I used the river of bodies to stay away from the two nearest guards. I jumped up onto the shoulders of a heavy-set fleeing tourist and ran over shoulders and heads to the back of the compacting line, where I somersaulted off and barrel-rolled to the far side of the room. Two helmeted guards had pulled katanas—katanas! And were drawing back to slice and dice me. One roundhouse of my axe took off four feet at the ankles.

The robotters felt pain, because they squealed like stuck pigs. I was already running for the next target as they both bled out. I darted my gaze around: Twenty-two guards who had been backed against the wall. Six of the roving minglers. The guards had drawn katanas. The minglers had pulled out SCK 9-mm handguns. One began to fire, and I paused long enough to grab a mook, disarm him—literally—and spin the bleeding body as slugs tore into him. Using him as my shield, I got close enough to behead the shooter. That gave the other five pause.

Three more swordsmen tried to pin me in a corner. I grabbed the katana of the armless man and threw it spinning. It pinned a second shooter through the throat—to yet another robot-guy, piercing his right eye socket. I think the rear guy died at once. The shooter dropped his pistol, clutched at the blade, and gurgled to death.

One of the swordsmen leaped forward, doing that stupid yell that sounds like "wa-tah!" I replied "Kiai!" as I split him from groin to navel. Man, Whisper was a hell of an axe. The other two closed, one right, one left, and I saw what was going to happen. I sprang head-high into the air, and they considerately hacked each other for me.

Another fool started shooting. A noob, because he plugged yet another swordsman between the eyes. I serpentined until I was in range, then chopped off his gun hand. He stared at the squirting red fountain, shrieking, but I let him shriek 'cause I'd caught his gun. I snatched the hand off it, flung it in the face of another swordsman, and then spun, trusting in Master Ax and in Fate and in dumb luck, firing boom-boom-boom-boom.

All four remaining shooters dropped, scarlet blossoms blooming on their chests. One or two of the fallen mooks were still lively enough to shriek. Another guard running toward me skidded in blood like a runner sliding into base. I hardly felt the pressure as I trailed Whisper and put him out of the game.

I waded into a little party of eight furious swordsmen and stepped out all by myself. It was getting lonely in there. I'd started out as one against thirty. Now only four katana-wielding robotters were left.

I backed away as they tried to form up and take me in a frontal assault. I stepped on another 9-mm, grabbed it, and put one bullet through each of their headpieces. Electricity fizzed, sparks flew, smoke curled out, and they dropped. Two people were still screaming, one without a hand, one, weakly, without feet. The sound annoyed me. Boom. Boom. The sound stopped.

Nobody was left alive to try to stop me as I climbed the long staircase. I saw a couple of guards on the seventeenth floor, no helmets. They stared at me and ran. Buh-bye.

"Pyronica!" I yelled. "Surely Bill Cipher's right-hand bitch isn't afraid of a mere girl!"

She wasn't on that floor. Nor the next. I found her on the twentieth, standing with her back to a glass wall. "I don't remember you," she said, sounding bored. "Should I?"

"Yeah. You watched while Bill offed all my friends. You laughed when you told him to give me a running chance. I'm back, Pyronica. To finish our business."

"You have been an annoyance," she said. "You have deprived me of many trusted servants. Too bad—" she snapped her fingers and grinned—"I have only fifty-eight more."

My God, they came out of the woodwork like cockroaches They must have armed themselves down on the seventeenth floor and then come up while I was busy. Pyronica left us, giving me a mocking finger-wave while going to a private elevator that rose, I guess, to roof level, up close to the flames.

Well. Roughly sixty mooks, all with robot helmets. I won't go into the gory details, but I will say that was the hardest day's work I did since Daddy and me logged off Mount Jagged.

Hey, thanks, Dad, you taught your daughter well.

Fifty-eight of them, and it took me nearly twenty minutes, and they were twenty _hard_ minutes. One of the lucky mooks opened my left bicep with his katana. Another one gave me a hell of a knock with nunchucks. I'd have a black eye the next day.

It was OK, though. The guy who slit my arm, I cut open his belly, and he stumbled screaming, tripping over his own guts. I forced the nunchucks down the other guys' throat and he choked to death. When Whisper spoke, fingers went flying and katanas fell. And hands. And heads. Once I had to leap high and somersault, taking the occasion to bisect a mook's head. With a backhand, I slammed another's headset clean off, leaving blood spurting from where the connections ripped free of his scalp. He staggered and blinked and then surprised me by croaking, " _Arigato_."

After thanking me, he took his own life with his katana: s _eppuku_ , apology by suicide.

One extra-big guy I feinted into falling over the railing from the top of the stairway to the gambling floor, where he impaled himself on a crystal abstract sculpture. And I faced three women, none wearing headsets, but all tough. Got two with the axe. The third one must have been dumb, because she tried to shoot me with an H&K 417 assault rifle. If she'd known what she was doing, she could have emptied the magazine at 600 rounds per minute—mag holds twenty, though—and peppered me good.

But she must have been dumb, because she couldn't do it. I ripped the weapon out of her hands as she begged, " _Īe, īe, īe, kore o shinaide kudasai_ ".

No, no, no, don't do this, she was saying.

I smiled at her. ""Here, let me show you. Gotta put the safety off," I said, demonstrating with my thumb, flipping the lever to firing position. I stuck the barrel under her chin, pointing straight up. She stared at me with wide eyes. I pulled the trigger. "Works for me," I told her, but she could no longer hear me or care what I said. I used the other nineteen rounds against the last men standing—down to eighteen again, and dammit, I missed the next-to-last one, but still I came out of it with just exactly enough ammo to finish the job.

Except the job wasn't finished. I wasn't sure that they were all dead, but they sure as hell were all out of action. I went to Pyronica's private elevator and punched the button. I yelled, "If any of you are alive and can hear me, better tell Bill Cipher that Wendy Corduroy is back, and she's pissed! Crawl out if you want to live!"

I stepped into the elevator and willed the wound in my arm to stop hurting, to close and start healing. And the lump on the side of my head to shrink. And my shaking arms to find enough strength to finish what I had to do.

Up on the roof, Pyronica waited.

* * *

She raised her eyebrows in surprise when I stepped out. The rolling red flames ten feet over our heads muttered and filled the square shoulder of the pyramid with hellish light. "Hello again," I said.

"I do remember you," she said slowly. "You changed your hair."

"That's a woman's privilege," I said.

"Silly human. What do you think you can do against us all?"

"Kill you one by one. Bring down the four under-lords. Finish up with Bill Cipher."

"Bill Cipher cannot be killed," she said, grinning. "I think he and I could use someone like you, though. Life is not bad for those on a certain level. You could be very, very happy working for me."

"No, thanks," I said. "I'd rather be a lumberjack."

"Such a waste."

And then with no sign of being about to attack, she lashed out at me, wielding a whip of flame. Master Ax had warned me, but my God, she was fast. I dodged, but the whip cut into my back, below the shoulder blades. It probably laid a few ribs bare, but the cut wasn't deep enough to sever any important muscles.

She struck again, and I dodged under the whip, caught the lash with the handle of Whisper, and yanked her weapon out of her hands. It singed my palm as I grabbed it and tossed it over the side of the pyramid. I heard it hiss down toward the street far below.

"Tell me," I said, prowling toward her, "what did you have against us back then? Why'd you urge Bill to kill us?"

"No reason. Did it for fun. Kicks," she said, as if she was enjoying the contest.

"Kicks are for kids," I told her. "Baby."

"Gahh!" She opened her mouth so wide that it looked as if it would split in two, and her tongue shot out.

But I knew about that tongue. I dropped just at the right moment, it hit the wall of the inner pyramid and stuck there—it was like a chameleon's tongue, it glued its victim and then drew it in—and I slashed the quivering red ribbon in two.

It bled fire. Pyronica jerked, howled, and threw herself at me. A katana of fire shimmered into existence in her hand. She swung, and I dodged, I swung and she parried with a clang that made my teeth vibrate. She pressed hard, I pressed back just as hard. She glared at the katana blade and the axe haft—which took no damage.

We stepped apart, circling. Her katana pulsed and hummed. "Where did you get that axe?" she demanded, hot fury in her voice. "That's no ordinary axe!"

"Picked it up on Amazone," I said, purposely goading her. "Got free next-day delivery."

She stopped. In a forced-calm voice, she said, "I apologize for not recognizing you. I admit that you are a worthy warrior. Now. Tell me. Where did you get the axe?"

"It's custom-made. Niyako Miyanzo forged it for me," I told her.

She hissed. "You _lie_! He no longer makes weapons!"

"He made this one," I said. "Because he wants me to kill Bill Cipher."

"Too bad you will never have the chance!"

Again without tensing, without warning, she hacked at me, cobra-quick. I drew back, and the tip of her katana missed me by a millimeter. With my axe, I returned the roundhouse blow.

She looked down, bleeding mouth gaping. I had sliced through her upper chest, through her breasts, through her ribs. Liquid fire spurted out.

"You—told the truth!" she whispered, unable to stand, collapsing to her knees.

Her kneeling made it easy. I chopped off her head. It flew over the edge and into the night. In the distance, great jets of red lava shot from the far-off summit of Fuji-san. It was clear this was no comfort-zone play of lava and flame for Pyronica's cozy home. No, this was the old mountain coming to roaring life, a full volcanic outburst. Payback for mistreatment, maybe. A shockwave rolled in, enough to shake the pillars of heaven.

Eruption and earthquake, oh, yeah, baby. Let's shake things up.

The whole damn pyramid began to shudder itself apart. I didn't dare take the stairs or elevator. I jumped over the side and slid down the sharp incline of the west face. When I built up so much speed that I felt the heat of friction, I chopped Whisper into the cladding and hung on tight to the handle.

The bite took hold, and for the last three hundred feet, I slowed my descent by eviscerating the Flame Pit. Fire began to billow out of the long straight deadly cut I made in the building's skin. At the end of the line, I dangled for a moment, wrested the blade loose, and dropped just about ten feet onto the concrete sidewalk. Spun my axe and re-holstered it. Realized that the sheath belt felt too loose and that it had probably saved my spine. It had been partly cut through but had protected me.

Nice of Miyanzo to throw it in. Maybe I'd drop him a thank-you card.

OK, not thinking well there, sue me. I was woozy and sick and the pain was seeping past my ability to contain it, and I could hardly walk straight.

Emergency responders roared in. I heard fire-truck sirens, _beeedoh, beeedoh_ , and ambulances, _eeeeeeeeeyahh_. A crowd thronged the street, jabbering, weeping, pointing, their eyes wide, hands pressed to mouths, like the awestruck spectators in those old Japanese _kaiju_ films, you know, giant monster movies.

Those humans on the sidewalk who were roboticized did not panic, but walked around blindly, bumping into walls, tumbling off curbs and onto their backs, their legs still trying to walk but their brains no longer firing on any cylinders. Pyronica was gone. There was no mind anywhere to tell them what to do.

Nobody else on the pavement paid any attention to them or to me, in my bloody, chopped-up jumpsuit, my hair coming unbraided, my eye black and swollen.

Hell, probably just another Pyronica-ruled night for them. Fun and games in the Flame Pit. Ho, ho, hey, hey, how many folks did she kill today?

They didn't know I'd done them a hell of a favor. They were gonna wake up tomorrow in a changed world. I strode away and was a half-mile distant when the whole damn Flame Pit collapsed. Among the staff and servants, there were no survivors, the Master told me later on.

But just then I didn't care who was dead, as long as I wasn't among them. Fading fast, I needed to get out of there. No one walked or lingered on the train platform, everyone had crowded outside looking at the collapse. Alone, at the head of an escalator, I took my last octagonal coin out. Kissed it for luck. Said, "Take me to Master Ax" and threw it to the concrete.

A glowing white circle of light irised into existence on the pavement. I stepped into it, it closed, and I was out of there.

A moment later, I tottered in Master Ax's dimension and in his home. He looked at me. "You are bloody. Don't drip on the furnishings."

"I won't. Pyronica's dead. Did I—?" I said, swaying from exhaustion as I faced him.

Thoughtfully, he replied, "Oh! You mean the examination. You passed. Have some tea?"

* * *

 _End of Volume 1_


	6. Chapter 6

**Kill Bill Cipher, Volume 2**

* * *

 **Chapter 6: The Twin Pines Massacre**

 _Goin' to a kill party now!_

 _Gonna be a thrill party, ow!_

 _Aim for the fools, just stay cool,_

 _Touch the trigger, pow pow pow!_

 _Kill Party! It's a rave for slaughter,_

 _Thrill Party! Blood flows like water_ _,_

 _Kill Party! Kill Party tonight!_

-Robbie V. and the Tombstones, "Slightly Violent"

* * *

 _August 2012 (B.W.)_

You'd think with everybody pitching in they could have done better. With Ford kidnapped by Bill Cipher and almost all the other residents of Gravity Falls paralyzed and frozen into position as components of Cipher's Throne of Human Agony, only those who had holed up in the Mystery Shack under the leadership of Grunkle Stan had even a slim chance of fighting and defeating the interdimensional demon overlord.

Mabel created their banner: "Take Back the Falls!" Like the Samurai battle flag in _Shichinin no samurai_ (The Akira Kurosawa film _Seven Samurai,_ see it if you haven't), it represented the core group: A six-fingered hand for the missing Grunkle Ford, crossed implements, a pick (Fiddleford) and axe (Wendy, duh), a question mark (Soos) twin pine trees (tricky, Grunkle Stan and Dipper), and a shooting star (Mabel). It was a good banner to fight under, and beneath it they organized.

Dipper Pines was the idea man: transform the Shack into the Shacktron, a giant fighting robot to be designed and built by Fiddleford McGucket. Mabel was in logistics, knitting sweaters to keep the ragtag army not quite so rag, dressed for warmth over the cold nights, and incidentally, garishly fashionable. Wendy trained their fighters. Stan was the designated Chief, even if he did the designating himself. Soos, uh, helped. Ooh, and he also introduced Fiddleford to mecha anime, which, like, made the Shacktron totally bonkers cool.

The scheme, in a nutshell: Attack the Henchmaniacs using the mighty giant robot. A combat crew in the Shacktron would draw them out and meet them head-on, protected by the unicorn-hair field and using weapons created by McGucket. If they could hold Bill's minions off or even disable them, eventually Cipher would emerge from his levitating stronghold, the Fearamid, to fight the Shacktron himself, leaving the place open and unguarded.

A boarding party would launch, made up of all the members of the Cipher Zodiac except Ford and Gideon (both already captives and most likely imprisoned in the Fearamid). They planned to parachute into the Fearamid, where their priorities were (1) find and rescue Stanford Pines; (2) set the other captives free; and (3) do something awesome to defeat Bill.

It worked, to a point—they did successfully invade the Fearamid while Cipher himself, temporarily blinded and infuriated, battled the Shacktron. Mabel located Ford, and thanks to advice from the caged Gideon, they restored Ford and then liberated Gideon and the other prisoners.

Then Ford told them about his long-laid plan to send Cipher back through the Rift and seal it up. It involved spray-painting a duplicate of the Cipher Zodiac on the floor and assigning places to the people represented by the symbols: Dipper, pine tree, Mabel shooting star, Wendy ice, Robbie broken heart, and so on. They would hold hands, power would surge through them, and they'd focus it to cast Bill Cipher back into the Nightmare Realm. It was a good plan.

And . . . it didn't work.

It failed mainly because Grunkle Stan refused to take his place on the Zodiac (the symbol of the Holy Mackerel Lodge) until Grunkle Ford apologized to him and thanked him for Stan's re-creating the Portal, while Grunkle Ford didn't see any reason why he should apologize. Their disagreement broke down into a sibling quarrel, Bill returned unexpectedly, and—

Chaos.

Cipher immobilized everyone but Dipper, Mabel, Ford, and Stan. He trapped the older twins in a cage, and then threatened the younger ones. Mabel spray-painted Bill's eye, temporarily blinding him for the second time in an hour. She and Dipper led him on a wild chase through the Fearamid, away from the Grunkles.

If only Stanley and Ford had made up their differences instead of continuing to fight over which one of them should apologize to the other. If only the two of them had formed some alternate plan.

But no. Cipher returned, grown to gigantic size, clutching Dipper and Mabel, and said he'd kill one of the twins just to show he was serious. He aimed for Mabel, Dipper threw himself in front of her, and Dipper died in a fountain of gore. Evidently amused by that, Cipher then killed Mabel the same way, and then Stanley.

And he picked up Ford, bit off his head, and absorbed the information he needed—a simple equation—to take down the weirdness barrier. Laughing with evil glee, Cipher imprisoned Gideon again, and then re-animated the rest of the Zodiac—he had sent them into two-D space, where they had no power of motion, only awareness—and killed them one by one, saving Wendy for the last. He'd always had a soft spot for Red.

Pyronica and Hexagony had returned to tell Bill that the henchmaniacs had dealt with the remaining rebels. And Pyronica was the one who leaned over and whispered to Bill, "Make the bitch run for it."

That idea appealed to Bill, and he told Wendy he'd give her a fair chance to escape, knowing she had none. Wendy had run, seeking a weapon, anything, weaving a zig-zag path, dodging and ducking, but before she could escape through a doorway and out of range, Cipher leveled his finger and shot a bolt of red energy at her, tightly focused.

She dodged, but—Bill thought—a microsecond too late. The red ray struck her right in the head, threw her forward four yards, and she hit in a loose-limbed tumble. She sure _looked_ dead.

"Ah-ha-ha-ha! Rest in peace, Red! Come on, ladies!" Cipher beckoned his two underdemons. "Let's go take a look at our new world. We'll clean up the garbage later."

Out they flew to take down the weirdness barrier, leaving the Fearamid to the dead.

And immediately a fat, round-faced guy in a silvery jumpsuit and wearing thick goggles shimmered into existence. He searched for survivors and found none. Then he looked for intact bodies and found Wendy.

"Are-are-are you d-dead?" he asked her, bending over her. Dripping blood painted the left side of her face red.

He leaned close, reaching to feel her carotid artery for some trace of a pulse.

She coughed blood in his face.

And for once in his frankly not very happy or effective life, Blendin Blandin didn't dither but _acted_. He set his belt time machine to activate in three seconds, grunted as he hefted Wendy's limp body, and they both poofed out of existence.

And immediately, somewhen else, back to solidity. The Axolotl hovered there, under a starry sky and above a grassy field. It was Earth at a somewhat earlier era, before Cipher had broken open the Rift., possibly even before humans had settled in the Valley. The Axolotl, who could range all time and space and dimensions at will, was purposely making a rare visit to Earth just for the occasion. However, in a physical sense the Axolotl was _not_ there, although its image, its projection, hung in the air, illuminated by the stars. Still, where even its projected presence was, there was its power also.

"S-s-sir!" Blendin said, choosing a gender-specific pronoun that wasn't even half right. "Th-this g-girl is still a-alive. But I don't know for-for-for how l-long!"

The Axolotl did something in its mind, and Wendy's bleeding stopped. "It is bad. She will need much treatment," it said. "I will send her to the House of Healing Spirits."

"Did-did I suh-save her?"

"You have. For what fate I cannot say. Cipher?"

Blendin gulped hard. and stared at his boots. "He-he-he and the others g-got out of their pyramid. They-they broke through the valley's b-b-barrier."

The Axolotl drooped. "The Pines twins?"

"Don't-don't y-you know?"

The Axolotl explained, "Even I cannot see through Cipher's fog of chaos. The twins?"

Blendin looked miserable and ashamed. "B-both p-pairs d-dead, the y-young and the o-old ones. It's all my f-fault. I'm su-sorry."

"Don't be. You did well in saving Wendy. Now the thing for you to do is to return to a time well before Weirdmageddon, here on this Earth, in this dimension. Go back from 2012 at least a hundred years or more of their time, and at least a thousand miles or more from Gravity Falls. You have always wanted to see the Old West."

Funny, but the thought of the Old West had never once in all his life crossed Blendin's mind. However, now that the Axolotl had made the remark, he was on fire to visit the cowboy era. "Y-yes!" he said.

"Then go, Mr. Blandin. Kansas would be good. Settle there for a spell. One day in your future—you may receive a call to return to action. Stay alert. Be on guard. And thank you for your help."

Blendin looked at the ground. "I-I-I had to try to m-make up for letting Time-Time Baby d-down. For, for tricking M-Mabel. Let-letting Cipher f-fool me."

"He is expert at that. And while the future holds many mysteries, I think I can safely say that Time Baby will return. Eventually. Your mistake has been atoned for. You are free of guilt."

"Y-y-yes s-sir! Th-th-thank you!"

The Axolotl smiled, and Blendin sent himself to the Old West.

And now the Axolotl turned his attention to Wendy. She had suffered terrible internal damage. Without his freezing time for her, she wouldn't have lasted another hour, as mortals reckoned time.

Or, had she been able to find immediate and advanced Earthly medical help, her life just _might_ have been saved, if you could call being wheelchair-bound, paralyzed from the neck down, blind, and aphasic the kind of life she would have wanted to live.

Flesh and bone had to be made whole. Gray matter had to be regenerated. Synapses, language centers, learned skills needed duplication. Memory—painful though it was—must be reintegrated and made whole. No human doctor could do that.

On the other hand, as long as she was in his care, Wendy could not die, either. She needed Time for that transition, and wherever the Axolotl was, even as a projection, Time was not. With some thought, the Axolotl made sure the Spirits of the House of Healing—a peculiar little pocket dimension dedicated to the single purpose of healing any being who reached it, very compact and all but impossible for any but the desperately sick or injured to visit by any means, normal or paranormal—became aware of her need.

And then the Axolotl sent her there.

The oddest of all the odd things was that the Axolotl had never physically stirred from its own dimension. What Blendin saw, what sent Wendy to her treatment, was only a manifestation of the Axolotl's thoughts.

Now, in the pocket dimension where Wendy lay, time progressed normally, at exactly the same pace as on earth, moment by moment, year by year. The Axolotl had only temporarily placed her in stasis before sending her away. However, as she would have needed a short time to die, Wendy also needed a long time to heal. That was all right. Now she had the time she needed, and the Spirits would care for her as they repaired her wrecked body. She would age, but that would only help to make her a more formidable weapon to wield against Cipher.

Four of her years would suffice.

What are the Spirits? No one except possibly the Axolotl knows. One sure thing about them is that they are not, in any real sense of the term, spirits. They have physical existence and may or may not be entities from the unknowable gulf before the Big Bang. They existed before Bill Cipher, even.

The malleable matter that comprised the healers' bodies was . . . well, not the kind found on Earth, or anywhere else in the Multiverse. Some were tiny enough to enter a body and travel through the smallest capillary, repairing damaged tissue. Others were enormous. Whenever they had a—call it a patient—they neither slept nor ate nor drank, but worked continuously to heal.

The healing Spirits would keep Wendy in a coma and see to her body's needs, nutrition, hydration, elimination, all that, while they repaired the damage.

When Wendy awoke, four years later, and crawled to the only exit—which the Spirits had forewarned the Axolotl to route directly to its own dimension—Wendy perceived the place she first found herself in as an Earthly hospital.

That was just her brain trying to make sense of her surroundings. In reality, where she was bore as much resemblance to a human hospital as a space shuttle does to an amoeba.

But her human mind could not make sense of the non-Euclidean geometry and the supernormal dimensions of the House of Healing. And had she seen the Spirits, who were entirely benevolent though grotesque in appearance, she would have been driven permanently insane.

They kindly let her make her own painful way out as they remained invisible. One of the smaller Spirits went along with her, having altered its form to become a walker. When Wendy straightened up before the Axolotl and her hospital gown dropped off, it and the walker both vanished back to the House of Healing. She never knew that.

Insofar as they were capable of it, her mystic physicians wished her well. For four years they had dived into her body, her thoughts and memories and hopes and dreams, and in their inhuman way, they had grown fond of the strong, red-haired human girl.

Those charged with re-knitting tissue had taken great care to heal her so completely that no scar, not the least flaw of bone or flesh, revealed where the red energy bolt had torn into her cerebellum. Many of the neurons in her brain were new ones, but they had been grown from her own cells and functioned exactly the same as the old, held all her memories, held all of her personality. A difference that makes no difference isn't a real difference.

Those whose task was to re-start that brain tried their very best to embed every aspect of her character and personality, her humor and endurance and determination, her temper and courage and confidence.

They were all very good at their jobs. The best in the Multiverse.

If the restored Wendy had a rougher vocabulary and a strong thirst for revenge—those came from within her, not from her healers.

Their task complete, their patient departed, the Spirits slumbered, waiting another call from a powerful, benevolent Axolotl for their services. That might not come for years, eons, an eternity.

But they were satisfied.

They could wait.

As for Wendy, she met the Axolotl in a room manufactured from nothing. The Axolotl designed it to give her quasi-familiar surroundings, a place that at least looked Earthly. She had a headful of terrible memories and a heart burning with a lust for revenge.

The Axolotl did not approve of interdimensional beings who wanted to rip all order to chaos. It had conferred with the Oracle, a seer and prophet and intellect that—frankly—despised Bill Cipher.

"Yes, your impulse is good. Use the girl," the Oracle advised the Axolotl. "Send her. She _may_ be able to do it. The odds in her favor are not at all hopeful, but some of these humans have a way of making their own luck. Send her."

"First she must be trained," the Axolotl said. "I will do that. It means she will be stuck in time, but that cannot be helped. If she is to go, she must be given skills and a fighting chance."

"Then do it," the Oracle said. "She's your only weapon."

"Actually, no," the Axolotl said. "But she may be my best one."

And they agreed on the only course of action possible. The entire conference between the Axolotl and the Oracle—they had a long, detailed discussion—would have taken at least one whole day of Earthly time, but the Axolotl did it between the moment he sent Wendy down to fetch for tea and the instant, an hour later by her subjective perception, that she came groaning back up the steps with both pails full.

It was only the second time she had run the errand.

"Did you spill any?" the Axolotl asked his best weapon.

"Little bit," she admitted.

"No matter. You will improve. One day you will run down and run back up again and not even breathe hard. Very well. We begin your formal training now. Your first task—brew my tea."

She looked at him, exasperation burning in her green eyes. "What," she asked, "is with your fucking tea?"

The Axolotl thought to itself, "I _like_ this girl."

* * *

 _In subjugated Earth's endless present . . . .. . ._

Pyronica had wanted adoration, attention, followers, victims, all in plentiful supply in the Asia she had controlled.

By contrast, 8-Ball wanted only solitude and warmth—not the heat of a volcano. Just sun-heat, baking heat, the kind that you can find in the great desert of Australia. Descended from lizard-like ancestors, 8-Ball loved that kind of heat.

Bill ran the whole world. Lieutenants like Pyronica and 8-Ball were designated sub-rulers. Pyronica craved crowds.

But 8-Ball asked only for a big hunting ground, servants when some job had to be done, and, now and then, special prey. No soldiers. He was a lone-wolf fighter, as he insisted to Cipher. Too often, in fact. A spiteful Bill had stuck him in what used to be Australia.

And that was for a good reason. Bill Cipher knew that way back in the early times of European settlement, Australia had been a dumping ground for human troublemakers and criminals. And why throw off a good old custom, huh?

So nowadays—oops, nowaday, with time stopped there were no actual separate days any longer, just one that more or less repeated with variations—when Bill Cipher found or was alerted to the slightest whiff of rebellion, boosh! The troublesome human arrived weaponless and naked in Australia, 8-Ball got the news, and the hunt was on.

Australia also still had a good part of its old population, and they provided 8-Ball's normal food, but a condemned person was a special tidbit, tenderized by fear, and, well—he always enjoyed a special treat.

"What a treat," 8-Ball said when Bill showed up outside his home. "You never visit."

"Yeah, great place you have here," Cipher said, leaning on his cane. "You could have a palace, you know."

8-Ball sat outside a rusted old Toyota Cruiser motor home, soaking up the sun. He took a swig from a bottle marked XXXX, though the beer it contained was home-brewed, like all beer in Australia was now that no industry of any kind remained on the continent. "I like this place," he said. "It's homey. You want a beer?"

"Nah, stings my eye," Bill said. "I hear you're not doing much governing, Eighter."

The billiard-ball-eyed monster shrugged. "What's the point? They live or they die. Either way, I get to eat."

"I gave you this place for your own _domain_ ," Bill said, stressing the last word. "I like to run things chaotically, but what you got here—it doesn't even amount to chaos."

"Suits me."

Bill looked around at the glaring horizon, the red stone and head-shimmering sand, before replying. "Pyronica's dead."

After a moment, 8-Ball nodded. "Huh. Dead. So it _can_ happen to us. You said we'd have all eternity, if I remember right. Nobody would die if we followed you. Couldn't happen, you said."

Coldly, Bill said, "It can happen if somebody _kills_ you."

"Another henchmaniac got her?" guessed 8-Ball. "Somebody wanted her territory, right?"

Bill shook his apex. "Not one of us. A human."

That made 8-Ball do a spit take. "What! A puny human?"

Bill vaporized the few splats of beer that had struck him. "Not so puny. Wendy Corduroy."

Closing his billiard balls, 8-Ball muttered, "Wendy Corduroy. Wendy Corduroy. That supposed to mean something?"

"Redhead with an axe to grind," Bill remind him sourly.

"Oh, yeah. Back in the Fearamid. You flagged her and then zapped her. We all thought she was dead. Didn't you tell us you killed her?"

"I may have said that. Evidently I was wrong," Bill said.

"Huh. She dead _now_?"

"No," Bill said. "She's hiding somewhere."

"From _you_?" That made 8-Ball laugh. "You also always told us you were omniscient."

"PR," Bill said. "Helped to keep the humans cowed. Back before I gained physical form, I was . . . highly mobile. Spied on everybody, all the time. I knew nearly everything. Now that I'm incarnated, I only know _lots_ of things. Yeah, I should be able to detect her if she was anywhere on Earth. In theory. In practice, it doesn't always work out, genius. Anyway, I came to warn you."

" _Warn_ me?" Another sip of the beer, and 8-Ball said, "Wasn't my fault. _You_ were the one tried to kill her. _You_ screwed up, not me."

"I came to warn you," Bill repeated in a dangerously pleasant tone, "that she'll probably come after you. You'd better watch out. And shape up!"

Gazing around the vast open space surrounding his mobile home, 8-Ball chuckled. "She wants to come, let her come. You know something, Mr. Cipher, sir? You killed all her friends, every single one. 'Cept Giddy. And him and her weren't friends anyway. Back on my home world, _I_ used to have friends. Somebody killed every _one_ of them, I'd want me some revenge." He put on a dreadful parody of an Australian accent: "'Strewth, mate, I reckon she _does_ crave revenge. And I say she bloomin' deserves it. And maybe you and me, we deserve to die."

Bill pointed his finger. "You really want that, I could arrange it—for you."

Waving him off and dropping the accent, 8-Ball said, "Nah, don't worry about it. If she wants to come to me, let her come. I could always use a long-legged snack."

"No," Bill said, not lowering his finger. "If she comes, you trap her. Hold her. Keep her _alive_. Send for me."

"How am I supposed to do that? You left me here with no way to reach you."

Bill snapped his fingers, and a blocky telephone appeared. "This is a calling device. It will work, though this miserable place doesn't even have electricity under your, I suppose you'd call it, rule. Look here. You pick this up and hold the part away from the wire to your ear. You talk into the part with the wire sticking out of it. To call my assistant, you push the red button. To call me, you push the yellow one. Be careful about the yellow button. If you bother me for no need, you die. Catch the girl. Pick up the phone. Push the red button. You do that right, I'll give you a reward. Otherwise, I'll kill you."

"All right," the other monster said, carefully setting down the empty beer bottle. He tried never to break one. Bottles were getting scarce, and he liked his beer.

"Say you'll do it."

"If you insist," 8-Ball said. "I'll do it."

"You've been warned," Bill snapped his fingers and snapped out of sight.

"Let her come," muttered 8-Ball, reaching for another bottle. "Let her come."


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7: Mausoleum**

 _Summer day, the grass is green,_

 _Sky the bluest we've ever seen,_

 _I'm feelin' love inside so hard,_

 _Baby let's go-o . . . to the graveyard!_

 _Cemetery lovin's easy to do,_

 _Cemetery lovin', just me and you,_

 _Let's have us a rave,_

 _Layin' on a grave,_

 _Park your ass_

 _On the green grass,_

 _We can love all alone_

 _On a warm stone—_

 _Love me in the graveyard, baby,_

 _And I'll love you low,_

 _Love you high,_

 _Love you baby_

' _Till you die—_

 _In the graveyard, baby!_

-Robbie V. and the Tombstones, Grave Rave

* * *

Time stayed stuck but events went on. Making no effort to shape up his oversight of Australia, 8-Ball continued his normal way of life, with small changes.

He relocated the mobile home, for one thing. Bill's generosity in the matter of providing motive force for the rusting old vehicles did not extend to 8-Ball's realm. Pyronica had pleased Cipher, so in her domain, cars, trains, even airplanes worked. But Australia had long since run out of gas.

Think of what that means. Imagine that you were an upper-middle class Australian, oh, let's say your name is Maxwell Hopson. Imagine you had saved up for years for a nice fat down payment to buy yourself a great second-tier luxury car, let's say a Volvo S60. And then the morning after you purchased it you wake up to learn that the world has been taken over by of extra-dimensional demons and that all the gas in Australia has vanished. Your brand-new car will never run again—well, just think about it. That would just plain make you mad, Max.

For 8-Ball, no gas was no problem. Fifty humans, chained to the hitch, could drag a mobile home, very slowly, across the arid landscape. About twenty died every day, but 8-Ball easily replaced them. Sometimes he dined on one of the bodies, other times just left them to sun-dry into mummies. Many of those who perished died of exhaustion and heat. A good few others, though, succumbed to the bites of Australia's venomous snakes or spiders.

That was something 8-Ball did not fully understand. He was immune to their poisons himself. If the humans wanted to be weaklings and die from one bite, why, that was their business. The deadly brown snakes, or the taipans—he'd grab one and swallow it whole, rather relishing the heat from its bites as it slipped down his gullet. It was like a hot-pepper fan chomping into a nice Carolina Reaper, which has been known to kill small mammals who took an incautious bite of it.

After some "months" and after efforts exerted by about six thousand haulers, at an 80% mortality rate, 8-Ball now lived on the outskirts of a small ruined city on the coast. Lots of urban rats—human variety—lurked in the broken buildings and littered streets, near enough if he needed reinforcements or lunch.

He parked the mobile home near the cemetery of a desolated and desecrated church, its roof half gone. No human refugees camped inside the building, though what further punishment they might fear was beyond 8-Ball's imagination. Surviving under Bill was hell enough.

And he made his plans and settled in, with the humans keeping their distance—he could psychically summon some if he needed, and compel them to come, but he did not intend to need them—except for the few who now and then replenished his stock of home-brewed beer or served as his meals.

It was a shame that the kind of telepathy the Henchmaniacs had shared in the Nightmare Realm no longer functioned on Earth, but Bill wouldn't alter all the physical laws of nature. At least he could use the phone Bill had given him when the time came. Though it would only reach two demons, come to that. He decided if he were up against it and really needed help, he might push the red button. Not the yellow one. You didn't want to make Bill Cipher mad.

Not that 8-Ball intended to push the yellow button. However, if he could follow Bill's orders and capture the rogue human, he knew Bill's chief personal assistant would just love to have her and have the chance to deliver her to Bill. Maybe, 8-Ball thought, he could somehow manage to turn her over himself. After all, with Pyronica gone, a happy Bill might be in the mood to give him more territory, or better territory.

He kept the phone handy, waiting for the time when Wendy Corduroy would come visiting.

The purpose of his life had dwindled down to waiting.

For her.

* * *

On my kill list, I had crossed off Pyronica and Hexagony. Master Ax had allowed me to rest and heal from my wounds. The third name on the list taunted me because I knew that after the first two, word would get out and 8-Ball would be expecting me.

He was the lizard-like bastard that, with Teeth, had once tried to eat Dipper. That was about all I knew. "Where do I find him?" I asked Master Ax each day.

"On Earth," he always replied. "Have patience. I'll send you there when I think you are ready. Drink some tea."

I hated the stuff, but I drank his tea. That put him in a good mood, as far as he had good moods.

Man, I used to think Stan Pines was the worst boss to work for. But Stanley let me slack off and goof around and never fired me. He never made me run up and down thousands of steps carrying seventeen pounds of water on a three-pound yoke.

Or teach me how to punch through three inches of wood from a distance of three inches away, making me do it over and over and over until my bleeding knuckles felt busted and I couldn't even close my hands on the well windlass. I had to trap the handle between both my palms and roll my aching shoulders to haul up the water.

Also, Stanley never teleported in a sparring partner I had to fight. Master Ax did—tough ones, too. An old bearded guy who could slap me nine times with the flat of a katana before I could tap him once with the flat of my axe. He could run up the smallest branches of a tree by (he claimed) thinking light thoughts. He could grab my arm and wrench it until I begged him to stop, and didn't stop until I acknowledged he was better than I.

Or the girl dressed in dark wraparound shades and black vinyl who came at me with real guns that fired, I guess, paint balls or something like them. They stung like hell when they hit, though they didn't break the skin. She, too, could run straight up a wall and across a ceiling, firing two-handed with deadly accuracy, and when I tried to shoot her, she could weave and bend her body cobra-quick, dodging the bullets as if they moved in slow motion.

I got her at last, letting go of my pistol, drawing my axe and throwing it, and grabbing the pistol again before it had dropped more than six inches from where I'd turned loose of it, then firing as the girl dodged the axe and nailing her one-two-three with shots to the chest.

When an observing Master Ax said, "It takes you a long time to learn to use the weapons with which you fight best," I asked, "How did I do that so fast? Drop the pistol, throw the axe, grab the pistol in mid-air, and fire three times?"

He replied, "Don't ask how. Just know that if you did it once, you can do it every time."

The girl congratulated me, but we had more fun times together after that. Damn, she was good.

After her, my next sparring partner was, like, the worst. That one was the irritating short old man who had me wax his car all the damn time.

But I learned. I learned something from each of them. After what felt like months, the old white-bearded guy swung at me, his face shining with the confidence that he would tap me, only to stare up at me in the next instant after I'd blade-hooked his weapon, jerked it out of his hands, and swept his feet from under him. He gazed at me for a second, and then, lying on his back, gave me a slow golf clap. "You may have a little potential," he said, and I finally realized that he was a human form taken by Master Ax. Duh.

And there came a time when the girl, with an assault rifle on full auto, sent a stream of bullets chasing me, and I contorted back and neck and arms and legs around them all and then chopped her weapon clean in two and poised the axe blade right over the middle of her forehead, the second time I'd beaten her and the first time I'd been able to dodge bullets at point-blank range. We stood panting, facing each other. Her dark glasses had half-fallen off and dangled from one ear. Her eyes were blue.

Those eyes said she knew I could have cut her skull in half as easily as I had chopped the gun. "Wow," she said with a slow, sexy grin. "Hey, good job. Some time let's go out together and do the town, babe."

"I don't swing that way," I told her.

And last, the little bald guy—after waxing his car over and over and over, I discovered I could anticipate and parry all his best karate blows. He couldn't land a single one. But I could have—stopping my hand just before it would have shattered his temple just north of his jaw joint, killing or incapacitating him. He had nodded, smiling. "Car is shiny enough now," he said. "Use what you have learned." He bowed to me.

Then came the mid-term exam, when I took on all three at once and emerged untouched, while they all knelt on the ground, Master Ax snapped his fingers—though he didn't have any, really, he manifested them at need—and said, "You are ready for your final examination. Pyronica is in Japan."

"Wish me luck," I said.

"Make your own luck," Master Ax told me. "You should be able to do that now. Prepare and then I will send you."

He did. But after I came back, after I had defeated Pyronica and Hexagony, I had to fight him in his white-bearded form all over again, and he was better and made me better until finally I turned aside all his attacks. He didn't wait for me to tag him. This time he said, "You will find 8-Ball in Australia. Do you feel ready?"

I said, "Let's find out."

* * *

Winter remained in Australia, now that the course of the Earth around the sun had been halted by Bill's power. He let the planet spin on its axis, though, to give the world a semblance of days and nights. And even in nominal winter, the part of Australia where 8-Ball had moved was always hot.

Then one day, always the same August day, the phone rattled and buzzed. Slow but not stupid, 8-Ball realized he was being called. He picked up the receiver. "Yeah?"

"She's coming." Bill's voice. "Catch her, don't kill her. Hurt her if you have to. Keep her prisoner and call me."

"Why don't I call Kryptos?" 8-Ball asked. "If I get Corduroy alive, I want to deliver her to you. But I can't leave this damn place. Kryptos can, or can stay here and sub for me. Or just return my teleportation powers to me."

Cipher snapped, "Not after you fucked up so bad last time. OK, you want to call Kryptos, push the red button."

"Thanks, Boss," 8-Ball said.

"Yeah, yeah, don't call me 'Boss.'" Bill hung up.

And 8-Ball replaced the receiver as he scanned the empty horizon, drank the last of the current bottle of beer, and then lifted the heavy phone and punched the red button. Instantly he heard the querulous voice of Kryptos, a being similar in some ways to Bill Cipher. An incompetent idiot, in 8-Ball's opinion, but Bill had made Kryptos his vice-dictator. "Who is this?"

"It's me, 8-Ball. Hey, you busy for the next week or so? I'm gonna have a package to deliver to Bill."

A pause, and then Kryptos, whom 8-Ball knew was already calculating "what's in it for me?" said, "I can be there. Give me a call when you need me. I'll drop everything and come."

On the third day after that, insofar as days had meaning in the unchanging now of the altered reality, Wendy Corduroy materialized in a stinking outdoor toilet, primitive, a revoltingly stained and discolored toilet seat on a galvanized, bottomless tub over an excremental pit. The outhouse walls had been fashioned from corrugated iron. The temperature inside was a hundred and ten. She kicked the door open, beheaded a brown snake that reared back as she stepped out, and looked around.

An old house, falling in and probably plundered for shelter material by the survivors, stood a few yards away. This probably had been a sheep ranch—station? Was that what they called them?—before the big change, before Bill's takeover.

"Straight ahead when you get there," Master Ax had told her.

So. Straight ahead and miles away under a burning sun she could see the vague heat-shimmered gray shapes of buildings. Beyond that the sky lightened in a way that told her she was near a beach and the sea. It was going to be a long walk.

 _Thank you so much, Master Ax._

The trek began hot and grew hotter as the sun slowly slipped down the yellow sky. By the time she saw the old church ahead and the rusted mobile home parked near it, stifling sunset had set in.

Master Ax had shown her a vision of the scene. "He will be in or near the home on wheels. He is not very intelligent, but cunning, fast, and tougher than you believe. Expect and show no mercy with this one."

"Yeah," Wendy had said. "'Cause Pyronica and Hexagony were so _nice_."

"If you wish to try your wit on 8-Ball," Master Ax has said mildly, "I suggest you wait until you have removed his head. No faltering with this one. None."

Wendy hunkered and studied the landscape. If this had been the Western United States, there might have been cacti or Joshua trees to provide cover, but no. A few boulders, most of them too small to conceal her. But if she circled wide to the ten o'clock position, she could come in through the cemetery. Tombstones and above-the-ground, single-crypt mausoleums, all in weathered stone, would give her, perhaps, enough cover to get her within a few feet of the mobile home without being spotted.

She crouched behind an almost inadequate rock and watched the western sky's awful red glare fade, waiting for dark and for her chance.

* * *

. . . I waited for my chance.

An hour after the sun went down, I saw a light come on inside the trailer. It was real dim and yellow, more like an oil lamp than an electric light, and it lit only one window, probably the living room.

 _If you wish to make no sound in approaching a foe, remember where you are putting your feet._

One of the things Master Ax taught. A hard one to learn, but once learned, it became habit. Even though I couldn't clearly see the ground, I knew where my feet had to go, and I took great care in placing them, one after the other. I made less sound than the evening breeze did as it began to sweep the dust.

One cautious stride. Stop and consider where the next will fall.

From the trailer I heard no sound at all. From the broken city a mile or more away came faint noises of music. From what I'd learned of Australia, I assumed it came from radios powered by hand cranks. The electrical system there was shot, scavenged for copper which could be beaten into spear points and arrowheads.

Funny how even when facing a bigger enemy like Bill Cipher we humans found time to hate each other and try our best to kill those who disagreed with us. I'd noticed that in my scouting expedition to Old D.C.

The ruined townscapes all around the former U.S. capital sometimes echoed with screams, shouts, and an occasional gunshot. Not many of those—Bill limited the supply of ammo. Pyronica, in her domain, let the weapons and ammo production roar along. Bullets couldn't hurt her, so what the hell, let everybody go armed all the time. And Old California, as far down as Baja, was supposed to be a war zone, so many arms slipped in from Asia.

But very few working firearms remained in Australia, close though it might be to the center of supply. The demand probably was there, but 8-Ball had a prejudice against humans holding guns, which theoretically could kill him, and so virtually nothing got through.

Next step. Each one took me a minute to three minutes to plan and execute. I didn't know a lot about 8-Ball, except he was an undiscriminating carnivore. He liked human meat. But he'd eat anything, including other sidekicks of Cipher. I'd heard that if a particular henchling displeased Bill, it got shipped off to serve 8-Ball. Or to be served to him.

The shaft of my axe felt slippery in my sweaty hands. After a creeping hour and a half, I was still three steps away from the last high step into the doorway of the trailer, I cautiously squatted and pressed my left hand into the dirt, then held the axe with that one and did the same with the right. I laid the axe down soundlessly and rubbed my hands together. Number 10, Wendy Corduroy, stepping up to the plate.

Another step. Two to go.

I understood from Master Ax that 8-ball didn't have much in his head. No brains, I mean. But his mouth, ears, nose, and eyes were there. The brain rested between his shoulders, a swelling at the top of his spinal column, shaped like a cobra's spread hood within the top of his rib cage.

Chop off the head, but not a roundhouse swing. That would blind him, deafen him, but not outright kill him. An up-and-over, blade coming straight down in the middle of the head, splitting it and the neck, cleaving into the soft meat of the brain, would do the trick.

That was gonna be hell to pull off in a trailer with a low ceiling. Instead, I'd thought about surprising him, getting in a quick blow, then jumping out as if fleeing, luring him into the open where I could strike most effectively.

If he didn't go for that, I could set fire to the damn trailer. Unlike Pyronica, 8-Ball was not fireproof.

Next step. One more and then kick open the door. Tricky—the front steps were dry-laid concrete blocks, wobbly, have to watch my balance, not tip them. I controlled my breathing and focused everything on muscles of legs and arms. Be in the moment. Nothing else matters but the attack.

Last step, and then up silently onto the blocks. I held my breath and raised my right boot to stamp through the insubstantial door.

I guess my Spidey sense tingled. I jerked my head back and glimpsed a dark silhouette loom out from the flat roof above me.

But I was off-balance and had no time to feint. It struck too fast for that, slamming a rock against my head. I'd twisted enough to avoid a direct strike—that probably would have killed me—but the world exploded yellow, and I felt myself falling back and the ground hit my back hard and I lost my breath—

Through ringing ears, I heard the crunch as 8-Ball jumped down from the roof and landed on all fours next to me. Felt his rough, scaly hands on me as he rolled me over. My reaction time was screwed. I couldn't move fast enough. I felt him manacle my wrists and I tried to shove them down past my butt so I could get my heels through—

Shit. He'd hooked the chain through my belt. He kicked me over onto my back and leaned down to pick up my axe.

"I heard you were coming," he said. "Surprise."

I spat at him.

"Bet you'd taste fine," he said, squatting down next to me. He touched my cheek. His hands smelled like rotten fish. "This is a good axe. Is this what you used to whack Pyronica? Bill's mad about that. He always had a soft spot for that fuckin' bitch Pyronica."

"Turn me loose and I'll fight you," I said.

"No, don't think so. Come morning, I gotta hand you over to Bill. But I know you're a mean little fleshwad, so—gotta stash you somewhere safe. And I'm gonna need some help. And I don't want to have you bitching at me." He stood up. "So—goodnight."

He kicked me hard in the head. This time I went all the way out.

* * *

Coming out of it, I puked. You almost always do when you're knocked out. You start to wake up, and then you vomit. I was laying on my belly, hands still manacled, wrists against my butt. I managed to turn my head just enough.

"She's awake," said an Aussie-accented voice. Human voice. Man.

"She ain't gonna hurt you." That was 8-Ball.

I heard stones grating against each other. Then a thud as something real heavy was set down on the dusty earth. A boot kicked dirt over the place where I'd vomited. Human hands rolled me over onto my back.

"Redhead," said the Aussie voice. I registered that it was daylight again—morning dawn-light, say, because no direct sun was shining, but the sky was a paling, dusky blue past the heavyset human's face. He was probably forty, forty-five, long shaggy black hair, few streaks of gray. He had a busted nose and a face sunburned until it was the shade of an old saddle. He grinned with gapped brown teeth. "Reckon she ain't had none in a while. How about it, Red? Fancy a root?"

"None of that." It was 8-Ball's voice, though I couldn't see him. "Bill wants her in her current condition."

"Bugger!"

"Let's get this done." Again 8-Ball hunkered down. I tried to roll back on my shoulders and get in a kick, but he was out of range. "Stop that," he said. "Listen, Wendy Corduroy. You're going into a tomb. You've got no say in it. Behave yourself and I'll call Bill in the next hour or so and he or his assistant will come and take you off my hands and you'll live at least that long. Scream and put up a fight, and I'll add an hour to my call-in time for every minute you keep it up. Just remember, you're going to be shut up in a stone tomb. No food. No water. Hotter every minute. You're gonna die in the end anyways, but you can make it hard—or harder. Your choice. And thanks for the pretty axe."

He picked up my shoulders, the Aussie guy grabbed my ankles, and they lifted me up five feet, swung, and then tossed me into an open mausoleum. I hit hard on my back, crunching into something. Rotten wood, a coffin. And bones. The faded, hateful aroma of old decay rose around me.

I heard them grunting. The Aussie cursed, and 8-Ball cursed back: "Dammit, put your back into it!"

I lay staring straight up. They'd thrown me into a stone tomb, a raised rectangular mausoleum-for-one. They somehow got the lid on and grated it shut an inch at a time, and I saw the rectangle of blue sky overhead narrow and become triangular, and then the triangle dwindle to a narrow crack of light. And then I heard stony thuds.

The bastards were piling rocks—more likely uprooted tombstones—up above me. They were weighing down the lid.

But I wasn't lying still. I was wriggling and shimmying like a girl giving a lucky client a lap dance. What I was really doing was shoving my jeans down, belt and all. It was tough going over my hips, but I squirmed and hitched and inched them down, hearing stitches popping, until I'd moved both wrists below the swell of my butt. Then I had to work them down my legs. I felt sharp things pricking into my naked thighs and calves. The broken ribs of the original occupant, I assumed, sticking through the decayed coffin lid.

My ankles had not been bound. I was able to slip off both boots. Then just as the last stony weight slammed onto the tomb lid, I started screaming, cursing 8-Ball with every dirty word I knew, and being Dan Corduroy's daughter, I knew a damn sight more of them than the average bear.

"Two hours until I call now," I heard 8-Ball yell. "Want to try for three? It's going to be hotter than an oven in there by noon, darling."

I continued swearing. There. Had my sock-clad left heel through my linked wrists. Took a lot of effort to pull my foot free. Now my manacled hands had only to come back up so I could squirm my right leg free, and then I could see about doing something with the handcuffs. "Three hours," 8-Ball yelled as I continued to curse. "Four will get you up to about eleven in the morning. Gonna be damn hot!"

"Right, mate," I heard the Australian say. "I done what you wanted. You said you had gold."

"Yeah," 8-Ball said. "In my place. Pick up the crowbars first."

I heard a grunt and some clanks and then a hard blow and something falling against the side of the tomb and then slipping to the ground. I had still not stopped cursing.

"Up to five hours," 8-Ball yelled. "I'll leave it at that. Bill won't want you completely dead, but the heat and the suffocation'll take the fight out of you. I'm going to have breakfast now." He chuckled, and I heard him dragging something away.

The Australian's body. _Bon appetite_ , asshole.

I rested for a few seconds, and then with some grunts, I had my hands around in front of me. I got the jeans leg out of the loop, but the belt was still fastened. I pulled it up to my mouth and moved it with my teeth until I could bite just behind the buckle. That was fiddly, but after half an hour, I flicked the prong up and tugged the belt tongue back through the loop, and the belt was free, and I could pull it out of the loops and get the cuffs completely loose.

The jeans pockets were empty, but I expected them to be. 8-Ball would have gone through the pockets. Not that he found much.

However—he'd counted on shackling me through my belt, and so my belt was still here. And to the right of the buckle, it had a little inner pocket. And in it was something short, flat, and hard.

My utility knife. Very thin, little more than an eighth of an inch, but 1095 carbon steel, extremely strong. Four blades. One of which was a lockpick. Thank you, Stanley Pines, for that stupid gift you gave me as a birthday present when I turned fifteen. Belt with a concealed pocket, stealth pen knife to fit into the pocket. I'd had to go back to Gravity Falls for it, my spare boots, and some clothes. Master Ax had allowed that fast trip, thirty minutes to pack and get back, and I'd made sure to find my belt with the knife.

Couldn't think about that, or the wreck of Dad's house. Something big had stomped it. Now the knife was the important fact of life for me.

Now that my hands were in front of me, even though manacled, I could use my fingers. I got the lockpick unfolded and then slipped it into place with my mouth. With my left hand cupping the right cuff and steadying it, I grasped the knife handle with my teeth. Then it took another half hour of trying. The effort made sweat run down my face and snot leak from my nose. At last the lock clicked and the right shackle sprang loose. The left shackle was easy, because I could use my hands on the lockpick.

Good. My hands were free.

Now all I had to do was get out of a tomb, the lid of which was weighed down by maybe five hundred pounds of rock, the walls of which were fine-grained sandstone perhaps two inches thick.

I lay back breathing the stale, stinking air and recouping some strength. I could do this. I could do it. All I had to do was remember Master Ax's teaching.

But, damn, it wasn't going to be easy.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8: The Painful Pedagogy of Master Ax**

 _Hey, you're a dummy, you're nothin' but a fool!_

 _What's an asshole like you doin' in my school?_

 _You don't pay attention,_

 _So you get detention,_

 _But hey, I gotta mention,_

 _We assholes rule! Us assholes rule!_

 _Assholes rule! Assholes rule!_

 _Oh, yeah, we rule the school!_

—Robbie V. and the Tombstones, "Screw School"

* * *

It was in the fifth year of my training that Master Ax began to take human form as that old, skinny man with long white hair tied in a topknot, bushy eyebrows, and a wispy beard that reached to his waist. He always wore a white kung fu outfit, a _saam_ , with a Japanese-style black obi. He wore the obi, I think, just so he could tuck his beard out of the way.

The first time I managed to tap him and then recognized him as Master Ax, he asked sharply, "You do not think I make a handsome teacher?"

"Little old for me, Master Ax," I said, straight-faced.

He did not smile back. "We shall see."

By then I'd had instruction in Bak Mei kung fu and in karate, as well as blade instruction with katanas, jians, and daos. And the axe, of course. My favorite, and the one I was best at.

But Master Ax changed form for two purposes: sharpening my kung fu and karate skills and teaching me about how to use my body itself as a weapon or, if necessary, as a tool.

I'd rather skip over the martial-arts hand-to-hand stuff. Let's just say that not once did I win a sparring match with Master Ax. After a year, the highest praise I'd received from him was "That was less bad than it was the first time we tried."

But his instruction in _tameshiwari_ —the fine art of breaking stuff with a bare hand—was what I drew on after 8-Ball imprisoned me in the tomb.

God, learning _tameshiwari_ hurt. I had to start from scratch—judging distance, finding the vulnerable point in a board or a concrete slab, not anticipating the blow and pulling back, thus decreasing the velocity of the strike and nearly guaranteeing that my hand, not the target, would suffer damage.

Over and over. Over and over.

After what seemed like a full month of this, I was getting no better. My hands bounced off the surface. The skin cracked and bled. The flesh swelled and bruised. I could not grasp the handle of my axe and could barely dress myself. Drawing up the buckets of water for the fucking tea was agony.

One day I hurt so bad and felt so discouraged that I wept.

"Do you want to stop your training and heal?" Master Ax asked. "Or do you want to kill Bill Cipher?"

I had been working on three pine boards, firmly supported on either end. To answer Master Ax, I bent low, studied the top board for a minute, and then, screaming, struck it one last time with my right fist.

The blow broke all three boards, a total of three inches of solid wood.

Master Ax nodded. "Now," he said, "we may begin."

* * *

Damn, I wished I had more light in that tomb. It was not completely airtight or light-tight—seams of light showed around the lid, and it was such an old tomb that even the sides had settled and gapped and showed gleams.

I decided that my best chance was the foot of the mausoleum. It was narrower, of course, than either side—less chance of my collapsing a half-ton of stone down onto me. And I suspected that it might be easier to crack than the long slabs of the sides. I wasn't sure, but I thought I had glimpsed the head of the tomb as they were about to toss me in, and it was within inches of the next mausoleum.

Inside the tomb I could tell where that end was. That was where the jawless skull gave me its dim, crusted half-grin. If I could break out that end, it'd be tough to worm my way through a half-foot crevice.

That left the foot as my best choice. I had to squirm around, dislodging insect-eaten crumbles of the coffin and the bones of the skeleton beneath me. In preparation, I rolled on my back and got my jeans and boots back on. I couldn't quite sit fully up—top of my head bumped the ceiling—but I could push back against the left wall and give myself enough room to draw back my hand and prepare for the punch.

God, this was gonna hurt.

Concrete blocks—not so hard to do, once you learned the trick of it, once your muscle memory had latched onto it. Concrete slabs just as easy. Stone, a lot more difficult. Igneous stone very difficult. Ah, but sandstone is sedimentary. Brittle and in need of encouragement to shatter.

 _Hah_!

One blow, and nothing happened except I hurt my knuckles. If I just had light. Every surface has weak spots, if you know how to look for them—and if you have light to look.

 _Hah_! No luck with spot a few inches beneath my original target.

I had another idea and did some more squirming. I had enough space to lie on my back and bend my knees back. Then—

 _Hah_! A hard kick, trying to keep my bootheels close together.

I thought I felt the stone crack. I hoped I wasn't making enough racket to attract 8-Ball's attention.

See, with a proper blow or kick, you can accelerate your fist or your foot to 24 miles per hour, or even faster. That means you apply maybe 700 pounds of pressure. No big deal—a stone table or even a wood one can support the weight of that many standing people without busting.

Ah, but that's distributed weight. Focus the impact an a very small area, and if the material is brittle enough, and if it is supported firmly enough, it will break. No guarantee that your hand won't break, too, but you can learn some ways that might possibly avoid that inconvenience.

So—heels together. Imagine the end plate of the mausoleum is Bill Cipher's face. Get your knees up. Focus. Deep breath—

" _Hah_!"

My heels punched a hole.

Stone clattered to earth. Light flooded in, and I kicked at the edges of the irregular hole I'd made. It was the size of a dinner plate, and my kicks fragmented the edges—and as quick as I could, I squirmed back around, grabbed a shard of stone still hanging in place, shoved and pulled and got it loose from its mortar, and then another and another—

Then I could wriggle my way out. Into the hot morning sun. I was sweating like an overworked mule.

And I didn't have my axe.

The trailer stood up front, fifty yards away, near the church.

I had no weapon but my hatred.

I set out to charge the trailer and deal with 8-Ball, and this time I wouldn't let him ambush me.

My last chance. I couldn't fuck up this time.

Let's go, you flippin' Corduroy! _Let's go_!

* * *

I couldn't help remembering my very first day of trying to learn _tameshiwari_ .

Master Ax snapped, "Don't try to hit the target. Try hitting something you imagine a foot _behind_ the target."

" _Hunh_!" The damn wood, just one three-quarter-inch thick pine plank, did not break.

Master Ax said, "An ordinary person off the street could master this in five minutes. You are not usually this slow to learn. Break the board."

"I don't know what I'm _doing_ ," I told Master Ax. "Tell me what I'm doing wrong!"

"That's simple." He stroked his old-man, wispy white beard. "You are not breaking the board. Again."

I made an aching fist. It had to be a punch, not an open-hand chop. " _Hunh_!"

"Do you think it's possible to break such a board?"

"Yes. No. I don't know," I said. "All I know is, it hurts when I try my best."

"Step back."

Master Ax stepped up and took my place. "Observe." He thrust out two fingers, index and middle, and beginning only three inches from the wood, chopped them straight down, tips first. With a single, sharp crack, he punched a three-inch diameter hole through the center of the board. "You see?"

"I see _you_ can do it."

He replaced the board with another. "You don't think you can do it."

"No, I don't."

"And that is why you fail," he said. "Break the board."

A week it took me to finally crack that first board. A whole damn week. And I did it by imagining Bill Cipher hiding beneath the board. A foot beneath it. And suddenly, _snap_! The single board broke almost as cleanly as if I'd sawed it. "Now," Master Ax said, "you will begin to find it easier."

So next we stacked boards. A lot of martial artists, when they do this stunt, separate the boards—pennies at the corners, even, leaving a sixteenth of an inch gap—but Master Ax said that was cheating, so with me it was board-on-board. And when finally, I could do three, then it was on to concrete slabs. And then fucking roofing tiles. Man, I _hated_ those things! They're _designed_ to diffuse impact. And finally, stone.

I won't lie. Learning all that hurt. A lot.

But the pain was a great—what would little Dipper have called it?—a great mnemonic device. It helped me remember the technique.

Dipper, man. Little Dipper. I miss him and Mabel so much. At night sometimes, I dream goofy dreams—that time in the convenience store with the ghosts, and Dipper prancing around in that hilarious lamb costume! Mabel asking me how to break up with a guy. Our last stand against Bill Cipher that came near to working.

But near counts only in horseshoes.

Hit _beyond_ the target. Hit like you mean it.

Now 8-Ball was the target.

I wished I had my axe.

* * *

First I had to figure an angle. When I noticed how the whole yard around 8-Ball's trailer was just tramped-down red dust, I found one. Kneeling, I carved a message in the dirt, using a sharp little rock to dig the letters in. Then I hid. I knocked on the trailer—close enough to the door, but not really on the door.

The floor creaked as he walked across it. I heard the squeak as he turned the handle and opened the door window—it was louvered glass, incredibly dusty, so grime-frosted he wouldn't have been able to see without opening it—and then heard him curse. He ran back through the trailer. He had to be getting a weapon. Then I heard him stealthily walk back through. He paused to look out every window, wondering where I was.

I was right beneath him, under the trailer floor, hunkered over, trailing him by sound. He came to the front door again. Stood a long time looking at the message I'd scratched in the dirt: I'M OUT, FUCKER.

He must have been scanning the landscape. But he wasn't gonna see me that way.

I heard the creak of the hinges as he slowly opened the door. Braced myself. Saw his green, scaly, two-toed foot step carefully down on the concrete block. When he took the weight on it, I punched.

Got him right behind the knee. His feet flew forward. He bellowed and hit his ass on the doorjamb, then toppled forward and face-planted in the dirt. The shotgun he carried struck on its butt, fired at the sky, and fell to one side. I was already out and atop him, straddling his back. The damn handcuffs came in handy. I held one cuff in each hand and used the chain as a garrote, bracing my knee against the top of his spine and hauling back as hard as I could.

I mean, 8-Ball's brain, what he had of it, wasn't in his head, but he got oxygen by breathing air. I pulled hard and twisted and cut the supply off. He bucked and kicked and grunted. Good, you fucker, use up what oxygen you've got in your lungs all the faster that way. He went limp. I kept up the pressure. He spasmed and gurgled. I didn't ease up.

When I was damn sure I'd asphyxiated him, I still kept the pressure on while I counted to three hundred, slow. Then I got off him and broke the breech of the shotgun. Both shells had fired. I took it by the barrels and slung it as far as I could—it could still be used as a club.

Well, glory, glory hallelujah, inside 8-Ball's home I found he'd just leaned my axe against the wall in the living room. Hello, Whisper, come to Mama. I grabbed it, ignoring the carnage stink in there, blood and feces mingled—I could see detached blood-clotted human feet and hands on the floor in the next room. I guess 8-Ball didn't' like those gristly bits of the Aussie guy.

Then I stepped out, cut off 8-Ball's head, kicked it out of the way, and chopped deep into the top of his spine. Yeah, there was the brain, not crinkled but smooth, looking more like fresh liver. I didn't just slice it, I _minced_ it.

Eight-ball in the deepest pocket. For good.

I heard a rattling buzz inside the trailer and jumped back. An Army-style telephone, sat on the floor. I grabbed it up and grunted, "Yeah!"

"Cleared up everything here. I'm coming now," said a thin, weird voice. I'd never heard it, couldn't place him. "Bill says to turn the girl over to me. I'll return her, not you."

I grunted.

"I won't have any trouble with you, will I?"

"Uh-uh."

"Remember that. You fuck with me, Bill will disintegrate you. I'll be there in five minutes."

That gave me time. I left the trailer. 8-Ball's body sprawled in the dirt, thin yellow blood still spilling from the wounds. Flies had landed on the body already. I bent to add two words to my message, and then backed off as far as the mausoleums. I hid behind the nearest one and watched.

Then a poof of red light flashed, and there floated in the air, I'm not lying, a living rectangle, slate-black, with arms, legs, and one single round eye. Like Bill Cipher's poor-relation cousin—so flat he was all but two-dimensional.

Even at that distance I could tell that he stood tilted, so he looked like a diamond shape—like one of those caution signs for slippery pavement, except for the color—and that something looking nearly like a drawing compass, complete with little stubby handle at the corner, made up the top edge and, I guess, was his head.

That gave him a little nub on top, almost like a brimless cap. Put me in mind of Stan's stupid lodge fez. Couldn't think of that. Didn't want my eyes blurred with tears.

He floated a couple of feet down to Earth and took a step or two before he registered the body of 8-Ball—and my message in the dirt. He spun around, wild-eyed—

But by that time, I was close enough. I hurled my axe, sending it spinning, thrown so fast it made a warbling whistle.

And it chunked into him just underneath the eye. He flipped twice and landed on his back.

I was on him before he could do anything, standing on his side corners, pinning him. He was about three feet on an edge. I remembered seeing him back in Weirdmageddon but didn't recall his name. His muscles surged under my feet. It was like stepping on top of a big old sting ray while wading in shallow water.

I yanked the axe out. He wasn't bleeding. I didn't know if his brand of inter-dimensional demon even bled. "Who are you?" I screamed.

"Kryptos!" The voice was so high-pitched and reedy it could be a girl's voice. "Don't hurt, me, Bill Cipher sent me—"

"Listen. I got a message for Cipher. I got a kill list. Five names. Pyronica was first, then Hexagony, then 8-Ball. Bill knows what happened to the first two. You tell him the same thing happened to 8-Ball. There are two more names on my list—his is number 5. One more and then him. You can remember that?"

"Yes, yes, I'll tell him when I see him—"

"See him? Guess again." I chunked the axe down and splattered his one eye. His thin scream rose, edged with pain and spiked with blind fear. I ignored it, tossed a token to the Earth, and stepped through the Portal it created. Let the blind Kryptos find his own way back to Cipher.

Not my business. Mine was to report to Master Axolotl.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9. Moisturizer Revenge**

 _Hey, girl, you only wanna dance,_

 _Me I wanna get you outa your pants,_

 _You wanna prance? You wanna dance?_

 _You wanna bop, bop, hip-hop and never stop?_

 _You wanna do the horizontal drag?_

 _I'll dance with you baby, if you'll shag_

 _With me—Let's shag, right now,_

 _Get down, show you how,_

 _It's like a dance without pants,_

 _Let's shag, shag shag right now!_

–Robbie V. and the Tombstones, "Shag Dance"

* * *

My next trip was going to be difficult, the Axolotl told me. "Make no mistake, Bill Cipher is a powerful entity. In his own environs, he still is in control of reality."

"Then I'm sunk," I said. "He can turn me into a fucking banner again. Or zap me with his finger-ray."

"Not exactly," Master Ax said. "There are some mitigating factors. You expect his attacks now. You are more skilled at avoiding them. And you have earned some protections that I can give you."

"You're more powerful than he is," I said.

The Axolotl, in his kinda creepy salamander aspect, nodded. "For a given definition, I am, yes. Bill Cipher has power in any dimension he controls. I have power over all dimensions of reality. Still, the rules say I cannot simply . . . extinguish him."

"If it wasn't for the rules, could you do that?"

"The act is conceivable but impossible. No. The rules say no."

God, I was getting frustrated with all this mystic-talk shit. "Who _made_ the rules?"

"One greater than I. But I agree with them. Understand, Wendy: Bill Cipher is chaos and ultimate disorder. I wish an orderliness and a purposeful striving for unity and peace. Should I give in to my anger—and yes, I do feel anger at what Bill Cipher has now done to two different dimensions—I would be as chaotic as he. And where would it end?"

"I don't know," I said. "OK. I accept that I gotta go and try my best against the triangle. So what chance do I have?"

"That depends," Master Ax said. "A man built a canoe—"

"Oh, please," I groaned.

"A man built a canoe," the Axolotl continued calmly. "But when he came to the river, he sought for someone else to try it before he would set foot in it. Now, is he a good canoe builder or a poor one?"

"Poor."

"Wrong."

"Good, then!"

"Wrong."

"OK, I give," I said. Then I tried something that works sometimes. I tried to think like Dipper. That didn't always help. This time it did. "He . . . isn't a canoe builder at all! It isn't really a canoe until it's used for the purpose it was meant for."

"I have no hands at the moment, so accept the words: Golf clap. Yes. Good observation. So, against Bill Cipher, what chance do you have?"

"The one . . . that I create for myself."

Master Ax sighed and sounded pleased: "You are ready, Daughter of the Blade. You are ready."

* * *

This worried me: Each time before, the Axolotl had provided me with those golden, strangely shaped coins. When I did what I had to do, or if I had needed to get the hell out of Dodge, I threw one to the ground and it opened a pathway back to safety. This time, no coin. I knew better than to ask.

"I can put you into position to enter the citadel unseen," Master Ax said. "From there on—you must rely on yourself, your training, your skills, and your instincts. Make yourself some good luck."

And, flash, there I was.

The sky overhead glared red-orange, dirtied with ragged black clouds. The Potomac—I guess—lay blood-red and sluggish. It looked like all the monuments and buildings had fallen, and a lot of the ground had been eaten away by the bloody water. The ocean level had risen, or D.C. had shrunk.

I suppose that I was standing close to the Lincoln Memorial, now the Lincoln Scattered Chunks of Marble. A roughly rectangular pool of what looked like blood stretched a long way to a stub that was probably what was left of the Washington Monument. And off to the left beyond it, and bigger than anything, bigger than the White House or the Capitol or the fucking Pentagon, loomed the Fearamid.

Either a rebuilt version of the original or a new one that resembled it, but bigger. Lots bigger than the Flame Pit that Pyronica raised, I guess, in imitation of her idol, Bill Cipher. This pyramid didn't float, though. It rested on the ground.

Swarms of eyebats circled high above it. So far, they didn't seem to have noticed me. I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing. The Master had taught me the stealth of the Unseen Step. You reached out and just clouded the minds of any creature you wanted to avoid. Including eyebats. There's gotta be a mind in there somewheres.

I felt the chill that came with the—trick, the magic spell, the illusion, whatever the hell it was. Master Ax wasn't big on naming things. If they worked, they worked, and that was good enough.

If you've created the aura of the Unseen Step, you must not falter or doubt yourself. I strode ahead, skirting the bloody reflecting pool. Nothing slithered, leaped, or wriggled around it or in it. I walked right up to the base of the Fearamid.

Now, where was the damn door? A hatch was open about three-quarters of the way up—probably a mile up the steeply slanting stone wall, no way could I climb that and maintain my concentration. I prowled the perimeter. It was over a three-hour walk.

Dammit, I should've turned left instead of right to begin with. The servants' door turned out to be on the face of the pyramid that had originally been to my left. I had circled the damn thing counterclockwise. If I'd gone the other way, I could have saved myself three hours of walking.

The way I spotted it was that as I was midway down the fourth and last side of the Fearamid, ahead I saw a line of what I took to be Gnomes filing out of the building like ants going to raid a picnic. The Unseen Step was still holding. I moved a little faster, but still confidently, and then felt like I was going to puke.

They weren't Gnomes. They were what was left of some humans after Bill had finished playing with him. Most were basically heads with arms sprouting from the sides where ears should have been. They used their hands as feet and bobbed along like birds. I also saw three disembodied heads with enormous staring eyes that . . . bounced. These had no arms, so they had to bounce. Like rubber balls. And they muttered grunting gibberish, _wah mah ko pa ee fah na wah_ , like that, as they did.

A darkness spread, and I stopped in my tracks as something, a bird, a dinosaur, God knows what, swooped down and picked up the bouncing human heads one by one. I heard each screech as the huge beak snapped it up and then scream until the wet crunch came. None of the three tried to escape. Maybe death by bird was better than life as head.

The gigantic creature flew away with a sound like a golf umbrella being flapped, and the line of arm-and-head monstrosities wound off in the distance like a snake. As soon as they were out of sight, I hurried to the place where they'd emerged. A square opening two feet on a side, thanks a lot. I had to drop to hands and knees to get in, and I had to crawl for like a mile up a long sloping, twisting ramp, but at last I emerged in an open chamber.

I found Escher stairs. I went up them and found myself descending. The one I was on made a half-twist, and I saw myself approaching from the other direction. We met and merged and were one again. I willed the stairs to take me somewhere that made enough sense for me to find my way to Bill Cipher.

And after half a day, in a way they did.

I heard the tapping sounds long before I found out what they were—rat-a-tatta, tap, tap, pitter-patter tappity tap. By then I was on a seemingly endless stone stairway leading up, gloomy, dimly lit by glowing red symbols in the walls, the roof over my head coming to the sharp apex point of an equilateral triangle. The tapping sounds got louder.

And then I started to hear gasps and vague muttering.

And then the stairway ended inside a hollow pyramid—four slanting walls coming to a point thirty feet overhead, and on the floor and in the center an enormous gold birdcage. The walls glowed a sickly yellow, but other than the cage I saw no furnishings.

And inside the cage, a fat, poofy-haired kid in a ridiculous clown suit, Navy blue jacket, purple tie spangled with glitter, stupid little purple sailor's hat on the side of his head, black knee britches, white stockings, and spangled purple shoes. He was dancing. Eternally.

I took off the Unseen Step and walked up. He didn't seem to see me. His eyes were wide and staring without hope at nothing, and sweat drained off his face. I could hear his gasps and his muttered, "Mercy. Mercy."

"Hey, kid, you know the Lamby Dance?" I asked him.

Li'l Gideon, the evil psychotic little bastard who had cheated Stan, who had conned the whole town, who had sold out to Bill Cipher, and who once had tried to steal my moisturizer, did not pause but stared at me with shock and hope.

"Weh-Wendy," he gasped. "For the love of God, unhook the door and open it! I've been da-dancin' for _years_."

"If I do," I said, "you gotta do something for me. Show me how to get to Bill Cipher."

"Anything!" he gasped. "I been in hell!"

Big fucking deal, the door to the cage was held by a gold hook and eye. I flipped up the hook and opened the door. "There you go, kid."

Gideon actually had to dance himself out. Then he collapsed face-down on the stone floor, as if he were worshiping me. Without looking up, he said to the floor, "I—I ain't been able to stop dancin', ain't had nothin' to eat nor drink, ain't had even a potty break in years! Thank you, Wendy. Thank you!"

"Get up and keep your side of the bargain," I told him. "I'm here to kill Bill Cipher."

"Oh, mercy!" Gideon said, pushing himself up to a kneeling position. "No, no. You ain't gonna be able to do that! He's got _power_!"

"Yeah, we'll see. On your feet and let's go. Once I get to him, you can run away for all I care. Just show me how to get there."

The evilest twist to Cipher's torments was that victims always knew what was happening. When he trapped me in the goddam banner, I could see and hear but couldn't move, talk, or breathe. I'm sure those poor damn bouncing heads knew their identities and who they had been and were capable of feeling pain as the bird monster crunched them one by one like cracking walnuts.

Good old Bill.

I made Gideon go first. He kept babbling, I kept ignoring. We crossed the floor to one of the places where the slanting walls met. On the floor there I saw a golden triangle. "It's the elevator, I reckon you'd call it," Gideon panted. "You just step on it, and it transports you right to the throne room. If Bill's here, that's where you're gonna find him."

"Step on it with me," I said.

He turned as white as his hair. "Oh, God, no, don't make me do that! Bill will kill me if he catches me out side o' my cage!"

"Yeah, and I'll kill you if you don't do what I say. Bill's up there, and I'm right here. How about it?"

"All right," he said, sounding miserable and defeated. "Ever'body pushes me around!"

So, we stepped on the gold, and something flashed, and there we were—the throne was the same, all the citizens of Gravity Falls turned to stone and Tetrised into an enormous chair. And Bill, three-dimensional, sat on it, leaning to the side, looking bored.

"I brought her, Bill!" Gideon yelled. "Just as you ordered me to! Kill her, Bill!"

"Kid, you touched my moisturizer," I said before cutting off his head.

It did not bounce, but rolled. The body fell to the side, spraying the wall red with blood.

Gideon had been number four on my list.

"Well, well, well," said Bill, straightening on his throne and cracking his knuckles. "It took you long enough, Red. You prepared to die?"


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10: Eye to Eye**

 _People call me crazy, and they might be right,_

 _Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm insane,_

 _I wanna squash the sun and bring eternal night,_

 _I wanna smash the beetles that are eatin' my brain—_

 _I'm insane! I'm insane! Craziest guy in the joint!_

 _You say! I'm insane! Sure, I am, but what's your point?_

—Robbie V. and the Tombstones, "Plain Insane"

* * *

"Hello, Bill," I said. "You prepared to try to kill me?"

Still lounging on his throne, Bill replied, " _Try_? Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! You mean—like THIS?"

He pointed a finger, like a quick-draw gunslinger, and a red bolt zapped out. I anticipated it and waved it away, wax off, and it ricocheted off to strike Gideon's dead body. In less than a second, what was left of Gideon looked like a marshmallow that had fallen off the stick and into the campfire.

"Uh-uh," I said, smiling. "Not like that." I hefted my axe. "You and me. Face to face. We have unfinished business."

"Oh, so you learned a trick or two, huh?" Bill asked, materializing a martini. His eye became a mouth to sip it. "Look, Red, you're way out of your league. Thanks for offing the whiny little bastard there, by the way. His dancing never got any better. He was a rotten PA, too. Little shit-head. Maybe we do have business, Red, you and me." He drained the martini and the glass vanished.

"Come down to the floor," I said. "Unless you're scared."

"You mean like in the old days?" He floated off the throne, snapped his fingers, and flashed back to a two-dimensional Bill, flat as a pancake. "Like this? You don't know anything! In this form I'm ten times as formidable. Hey, I'm being reasonable here, no need for violence, so let's you and me make a deal. For some reason, I seem to be running a little short in the friends department, Red."

"Hate to break this to you, but you got no friends—Yellow."

"Ooh, we're gonna be all racist, are we?" Bill cooed. "Come on, Red, I gotta admit you impressed me. You took down Pyronica, Hexagony, 8-Ball, little Giddy there—and what the fuck did you do to Kryptos's eye?"

My silver axe was vibrating, humming, whispering in my grip, eager for action. "Nothing much. Gouged it out."

"He couldn't regenerate the fucking thing!" Bill said. "Blind! And I couldn't magic it back, either. Tried and it wouldn't hold. He was boring me, so I had to kill him. You got some secret weapon, Red. Use it on my side. You know, the winning side. Let's talk about a deal."

I shook my head. "No deal."

"C'mon, I'm the _master_ of the deal! Look, Asia's falling apart without a leader. You can take Pyronica's place, OK? I'll grant you mystic powers! You can use magic. All I ask is that you hold things together over there. I know you can do it. Whattaya say?"

"I say you killed my friends, and I say I'm gonna fuckin' kill you, Cipher."

"No loyalty!" Bill yelled. "My henchmaniacs all fail me! They're not loyal, that's the whole problem. Come on, Red, I'm on the verge of leaving this dirtball and taking over another, bigger civilization about a hundred light-years away—that's only an instant in magic travel! I could even leave you here as the ruler of Earth, kid. Dictator for all eternity! Own anything and anyone your heart desires! This is the chance of a lifetime!"

"Come down," I said. "And fight.

"Sheesh, kid, you're _asking_ for it. I should've checked to make sure you were dead back during Weirdmageddon."

"You shouldn't have come to Earth to begin with," I told him. "You've been alive for trillions of years, they tell me. Today you're gonna be dead."

He sighed. "Look, Red, do you think you got into the Fearamid here by yourself? I _foresaw_ your coming here. It's a trap, kid! You've already lost."

"Then come down and prove it," I said.

"OK. OK. I guess I gotta kill you." He floated down to the ground, took off his stupid top hat, and laid aside his cane. "I guess we start by bowing?"

I feinted a bow, and as I expected, he shot another red bolt at me. I did the wax-on mirror gesture, and it rebounded, incinerating his hat. "Damn you!" he said. "You're really full of yourself!"

* * *

" _If you want to take down Bill Cipher for good, you have to remember three main points," Master Ax had warned me._

" _What are they?"_

" _When the time comes, you will know."_

* * *

I figured that the first point was mine already—I'd lured him down for a face-to-face. Now getting close enough for a swing must be the second point, I supposed.

We circled, wary as two mama cats, each intent on protecting her litter, each eager to tear out the throat of the other.

He taunted me: "You look older, Red. Not bad, though, not bad. Some nice muscles there. Shame you never grew tits."

"Come closer and check 'em out," I said.

"C'mon, kid. You know you can't win. I'm all-powerful! And even if you got close, I could do this—" He kited up fifty feet.

"Yellow," I said. "You know what that used to mean, if somebody was yellow? It fits you!"

He floated down like a falling autumn leaf. "First thing, I guess I oughta take away your toy axe." He sprouted six more arms and came at me, trying to hammer me. I dodged and then chopped one off. He stepped back. "Good aim. But lookie here!" He held out the stub and the arm regenerated. "I could do this for all eternity!"

It was no good sticking with defense. He'd wear me down. But how to attack?

* * *

" _You will have the problem of how to make him earthbound, how to keep him from floating away. The first point. That step is the way to eventual victory."_

* * *

Thanks so much for your instruction, Master Ax, you axhole! As I moved and danced, avoiding his fist-blows and his red bolts, I ran over what Master Ax had said.

And realized that words had more than one meaning.

When I feinted a blow at his eye, Bill half-turned, and I changed the vector. The axe crunched as though I were cutting into a dry, hard oak log—

And a tiny piece of Bill fell off. It was only the lower left corner of the triangle, a mini-triangle of its own, maybe an inch on the sides—but it flashed blue and then vanished.

"Ouch!" Bill howled. And then he laughed. "Ah-ha-ha, I'm kidding! Didn't hurt, Red. Watch this!"

The corner reformed. And then faded. The eye frowned, Bill tried to re-form the corner again with the same failed result, and then his eye went wide with panic.

"From now on," I told him. "You can't regenerate, you bastard. Not before one of us is dead, and if it's you, that's too bad, right?"

He tried to rise in the air, but only made a pathetic short hop and then came down again. "What did you _do_ to me?"

"This!" I said, and before he could react, I chopped off the right point of the triangle.

"No!" Bill shrieked. "No, no, no, no! I can't be _losing_ —"

He _was_ losing, at least losing his power to hold things together. Around us the Fearamid dissolved into showering rust-colored dust, We two floated down and finally stood on the mound of pulverized rubble that had been his citadel.

"Come on, Red!" he said, cajoling. "Last chance! I've been easy on you, but I can always summon my armies!"

"Nope," I said. "I heard there were three points to defeating you. You're down to one." It was ridiculous, but I swung Whisper and took off the top point of Bill as easy as chopping down a sapling. "You've had it, Bill."

Now he snapped his fingers and nothing happened. Nothing. His eye was saucer-sized with fear. He couldn't fly. He couldn't call his minions. He could only scrabble across the pile of dirt, frantic like a wounded crab, trying to put off the inevitable. "Come _on_ , kid! Don't—don't kill me! Look, what will it take to buy you off?"

"Are you sorry that you killed all my friends?" I asked sweetly, approaching him with my axe at the ready.

He gazed at me, his pupil actually forming a question mark. "Sorry? What does that _mean_?"

"I thought not. Goodbye, Bill." My next blow caught the mutilated triangle right in the eye. He changed forms like a jerky movie, monstrous, mucous, shattered, boiling, and then—he began to evaporate into a melting puddle of sick slime and yellow oily smoke.

All around me, Washington, D.C. began to re-form itself.

I should have stayed on my guard.

From the wreathing, greasy yellow smoke of a dying Bill, one last red ray shot out.

Damn it. Didn't expect it.

It hit me . . . in the heart. . .

* * *

I was fighting my way through a darkness that was physical. Devils were dragging me. I was trying to find my axe, _Zyeribia Sto',_ Whisper of Death. I needed it to chop down the gates of hell for Niyako Miyanzo as soon as I got there, I'd promised the master bladesmith—

"Sh-sh-sh. Lie still. You're OK. You're not dead."

"Huhh?" I heard myself groan. "What—Bill Cipher—"

"He's dead. You did it, Wendy. You killed Bill Cipher."

"I . . . did it?"

"You're safe. Here. Drink this."

Someone was holding me up and putting a cup to my lips. I sipped from it.

Hot. It was fucking . . . tea.

* * *

That time I slept without nightmares. And when I woke, I hurt all over. The voice, a guy's voice: "How do you feel now?"

"Hurtin' like hell."

"Good. That tells you you're alive." He moved closer to the bed, but it was so dark I couldn't see him. "You took a death-ray to the chest, but it was weak, and the Master had given you some magic protection, so it didn't hit you as hard as it was meant to. He sent me to find you and return you here. Do you want anything?"

"Light?"

"Master Axolotl! Wendy wants light."

The place glowed as if morning were pouring through a window beside the bed. I blinked and looked around, my head not right. I saw—log walls. A bed framed from solid oak. A . . . a sign on the wall over my head, foreshortened. But I knew it—a fallout shelter sign. And hanging beside the window on the wall, _Zyeribia Sto',_ the axe that Niyako Miyanzo had made for me, shining like the glory of angels.

I knew that room, but it was impossible. "Where in hell am I?"

The guy—it was a strangely familiar guy, good-looking, little gawky, about my age, shaggy brown-haired, wearing a—I almost laughed—a green plaid flannel shirt—sat in a chair beside my bed. "Not hell," he said. He smiled. "Not Gravity Falls, either, but a place to rest and heal."

"This looks like my family's place, but I've been there, and it got busted all to hell."

The boy looked around. "Well, it's sorta modeled after your old bedroom. It's good to see you again."

I frowned. "I ought to know you."

His eyes were brown and bright, and he had the greatest smile. "Thanks for lending me the keys to the golf cart," he whispered.

Oh, damn, damn, damn! I thought I had got over weeping. But damned if I didn't bolt out of bed and cling to him and bury my face in his shoulder and clench my fingers in the flannel of his shirt and then I shook and sobbed and cried until I could talk again. "Dipper! Oh, my God, Dipper! But I saw you die!"

"I know," he said softly.

"But you didn't!"

"That's . . . complicated," he said. "But rest, and then eat, and then we'll see the Master."

Rest, eat, I couldn't, oh, God, I had to go then, I had to. And Dipper went with me, outside, in the clean air, in the forest that I loved. When we got there, the Axolotl was already waiting and gently told us a few things:

"Wendy, your Dipper is dead. And your friends. That is true and cannot be changed. I'm sorry. I can't fix that. When you killed Cipher, time rewound, but what had been done up to the point of his abolishing the weirdness barrier and his escape from Gravity Falls remained done. In many ways, that world is still broken, and the people in that reality must fix it. All the frozen ones in the Throne of Agony are alive again—your family, the people of Gravity Falls. But those whom Bill actually killed, the Pines family and your friends, are truly dead. As are the ones you have killed. All of Bill's minions, in fact, were pulled back into the Nightmare Realm and wiped from existence in the thousand corrupted time lines that branched from yours. But the devastation on your personal Earth is still great. If you wish, you could return—"

Go back to the place where I'd seen them die. My stomach turned at the thought. "I don't want to go back," I said. "But wait—if this is Dipper—"

"I'm the same as you," Dipper told me. "A survivor. But from a different reality. In mine, Cipher killed my whole family and you and all your friends. All the Zodiac, except me. He froze me into gold as a trophy, but that wore off when he left the valley and forgot about me. Then later the Axolotl sent someone to bring me to him and he and trained me, and in my dimension, I killed Cipher, too, and wiped out his minions in the time lines that branched from mine. I feel the same as you. I could return to my reality, but there's no point. I'd be without my sister, my Grunkles . . . and without my Wendy."

"You have each other," the Axolotl said. "And now all the _other_ realities, the ones that did not branch from yours, are repaired. In a major one, you all survived because Stanley Pines sacrificed his mind to destroy Bill. In every other one but your two, Bill perished by other means. Now the last of his manifestations have been dealt with. And there is a Dipper and there is a Wendy left over, and they are alone and they need each other."

"How old are you?" I asked Dipper. Damn, Dip had grown up to be a handsome, strong guy.

"Nineteen last birthday," he said. "In my dimension, I was thawed out for seven years and kept on the run in and around Gravity Falls, hiding from Bill's minions all that time before the Oracle finally came to my Earth to rescue me. I was brought here and then Master Axolotl trained me for another seven years, except here—"

I put my finger against his lips. "Except here, no time passes. I know. Same with me. I'm nineteen, too." I turned to the Axolotl. "Where will we go?"

He sighed. "You _could_ return to any one of many thousands of Gravity Falls dimensions, children. But in all of them, you will either miss your dead friends or else have to deal with being duplicates of the versions of yourselves that live there already. Or—you could stay here and help me."

"Here," as he explained, was not his own dimension, but a newly created pocket dimension—Gravity Falls, but with only the Mystery Shack, which now somehow contained my old bedroom, and the woods around it, no other people. And no time passed there. "What would we do?" I asked.

"Be my helpers." The Axolotl said, "Bill Cipher wiped out the Time Baby in all universes. However, he will eventually re-form. It is good that he will create the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squad. They have their role to play. However, I want him to realize that destroying the world he finds when he reawakens is attacking the wrong thing—the victims, not the enemy. You can help me persuade him. I will let you live here between missions, but I will send you to many different Earths to work for and with me. Together, we can make better worlds and, I hope, you can eventually find one for yourselves. But it will take eons, as measured on Earth."

Dipper reached for my hand. "I'd love to spend eons with you," he said.

I smiled through tears. "Hey, you mean a lot to me, and I—I guess I'm not too old for you. Not now."

"You're just right for me," he said. He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. "If I'm good enough for you."

"We could teach each other fighting techniques," I whispered.

He grinned, the old grin that I remembered and that melted me. Squeezing my hand, he said softly, "And we could keep alive the memories of those we lost. Maybe one day even somehow find our way back to some version of our old lives. Together."

"Together," I agreed.

Axolotl sighed. "You two humans, so emotional. Kiss each other already; it's high time."

We did, and then he added, "And now one of you—make me a fucking cup of tea."

* * *

End of Volume 2


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